d
brought from all parts of the body, to the stomach, and from thence
rising up to the mouth of the Tobacconist, as to the helme of a
Sublimatory, are voided and spitten out."

When plague was abroad even children were compelled to smoke. At the
time of the dreadful visitation of 1665 all the boys at Eton were
obliged to smoke in school every morning. One of these juvenile
smokers, a certain Tom Rogers, years afterwards declared to Hearne,
the Oxford antiquary, that he never was whipped so much in his life as
he was one morning for not smoking. Times have changed at Eton since
this anti-tobacconist martyr received his whipping. It is sometimes
stated that at this time smoking was generally practised in schools,
and that at a stated hour each morning lessons were laid aside, and
masters and scholars alike produced their pipes and proceeded to smoke
tobacco. But I know of no authority for this wider statement; it seems
to have grown out of Hearne's record of the practice at Eton.

The belief in the prophylactic power of tobacco was, however, very
generally held. When Mr. Samuel Pepys on June 7, 1665, for the first
time saw several houses marked with the ominous red cross, and the
words "Lord, have mercy upon us" chalked upon the doors, he felt so
ill at ease that he was obliged to buy some roll tobacco to smell and
chew. There is nothing to show that Pepys even smoked, which
considering his proficiency in the arts of good-fellowship, is perhaps
a little surprising. Defoe, in his fictitious but graphic "Journal of
the Plague Year in London," says that the sexton of one of the London
parishes, who personally handled a large number of the victims, never
had the distemper at all, but lived about twenty years after it, and
was sexton of the parish to the time of his death. This man, according
to Defoe, "never used any preservative against the infection other
than holding garlic and rue in his mouth, and smoking tobacco."

When excavations were in progress early in 1901, preparatory to the
construction of Kingsway and Aldwych, they included the removal of
bodies from the burying-grounds of St. Clement Danes and St.
Mary-le-Strand; and among the bones were found a couple of the curious
tobacco-pipes called "plague-pipes," because they are supposed to have
been used as a protection against infection by those whose office it
was to bury the dead. These pipes have been dug up from time to time
in numbers so large that one antiqu