nglish country-house, said that
the ladies retired about eleven, while the gentlemen finished their
day's work in the smoking-room--the secluded apartment--or enjoyed a
cigar at the billiard-table; but a smoke in the billiard-room was only
allowed if that room was not near the drawing-room or in the hall
close by. "You must have often been surprised," she continued, "that
we English ladies have such an invincible repugnance to tobacco smoke,
but there is no dispensation from our rule of abstinence, except in
those rooms which my husband has already pointed out to you."

The professor, after luncheon, was pressed by the squire--"who, on any
other occasion would never waste time in smoking, and only filled his
short clay pipe at the end of his day's work"--to come to his
smoking-room. As regards this room the professor drily remarked--"I
thought I had noticed that even the key-hole was stopped up, in order
to preserve the ladies' delicate nerves from every disagreeable
sensation." After dinner, again, when the ladies had left the table,
"the gentlemen passed the bottles of port, sherry, and claret, with
the regularity of planets from hand to hand," but no one dreamed of
smoking. That was reserved for the secluded apartment after the ladies
had gone to bed. Neither host nor guest imagined what a revolution
another generation or so would make in these social habits.

In the 'fifties the pipes smoked were mostly clays. There were the
long clays or "churchwardens," to be smoked in hours of ease and
leisure; and the short clays--"cutties"--which could be smoked while a
man was at work. Milo, a tobacconist in the Strand, and Inderwick,
whose shop was near Leicester Square, were famous for their pipes,
which could be bought for 6d. apiece. A burlesque poem of 1853, in
praise of an old black pipe, says:

_Think not of meerschaum is that bowl: away,
Ye fond enthusiasts! it is common clay,
By Milo stamped, perchance by Milo's hand,
And for a tizzy purchased in the Strand._

_Famed are the clays of Inderwick, and fair
The pipes of Fiolet from Saint Omer._

I am indebted for this quotation to a correspondent of _Notes and
Queries_, September 27, 1913.

Another correspondent of the same journal, Colonel W.F. Prideaux, also
replying to a query of mine, wrote: "Before briar-root pipes came into
common use clay pipes were of necessity smoked by all classes. When I
matriculated at Oxford at the Easter of 18