an coming newly to London," and
for the first time seeing a man smoking, extinguished the fire with a
"bowle of beere" which he had in his hand.

Various places are traditionally associated with Raleigh's first pipe.
The most surprising claim, perhaps, is that of Penzance, for which
there is really no evidence at all. Miss Courtney, writing in the
_Folk-Lore Journal_, 1887, says: "There is a myth that Sir Walter
Raleigh landed at Penzance Quay when he returned from Virginia, and on
it smoked the first tobacco ever seen in England, but for this I do
not believe that there is the slightest foundation. Several western
ports, both in Devon and Cornwall, make the same boast." Miss Courtney
might have added that Sir Walter never himself visited Virginia at
all.

Another place making a similar claim is Hemstridge, on the Somerset
and Dorset border. Just before reaching Hemstridge from Milborne Port,
at the cross-roads, there is a public-house called the Virginia Inn.
There, it is said, according to Mr. Edward Hutton, in his "Highways
and Byways in Somerset," "Sir Walter Raleigh smoked his first pipe of
tobacco, and, being discovered by his servant, was drenched with a
bucket of water."

At the fifteenth-century Manor-House at South Wraxall, Wiltshire, the
"Raleigh Room" is shown, and visitors are told that according to local
tradition it was in this room that Sir Walter smoked his first pipe,
when visiting his friend, the owner of the mansion, Sir Henry Long.

Another tradition gives the old Pied Bull at Islington, long since
demolished, as the scene of the momentous event. It is said in its
earlier days to have been a country house of Sir Walter's, and
according to legend it was in his dining-room in this house that he
had his first pipe. Hone, in the first volume of the "Every Day Book"
tells how he and some friends visited this Pied Bull, then in a very
decayed condition, and smoked their pipes in the dining-room in memory
of Sir Walter. From the recently published biography of William Hone
by Mr. F.W. Hackwood, we learn that the jovial party consisted of
William Hone, George Cruikshank, Joseph Goodyear, and David Sage, who
jointly signed a humorous memorandum of their proceedings on the
occasion, from which it appears that "each of us smoked a pipe, that
is to say, each of us one or more pipes, or less than one pipe, and
the undersigned George Cruikshank having smoked pipes innumerable or
more or less," and that "seve