ends which
were to pick up the coal are shaped like two little hands, while "the
edges have slight mouldings and even a low bead enrichment. The
circular flat on the side away from the projecting stopper has two
tiny engraved pictures; on one side of the joint a bottle and tall
wine-glass, on the other a pair of long clay pipes crossed, and a bowl
of tobacco shown in section." This beautiful little implement bears
the engraved name of its Surrey maker, and the date 1795.

Country-folk nowadays often light their pipes in the old way, by
picking up a live coal, or, in Ireland, a fragment of glowing peat,
from the kitchen fire, with the ordinary tongs, and applying it to the
pipe-bowl; but the old ember-tongs are seldom seen. They may still be
found in some farmhouses and country cottages, which have not been
raided by the agents of dealers in antique furniture and implements,
but examples are rare. This is a digression, however, which has
carried us far away from the early years of the seventeenth century.

It is pretty clear that not a few of the druggists who sold tobacco
were great rascals. Ben Jonson has let us into some of their secrets
of adulteration--the treatment of the leaf with oil and the lees of
sack, the increase of its weight by other artificial additions to its
moisture, washing it in muscadel and grains, keeping it in greased
leather and oiled rags buried in gravel under ground, and by like
devices. Other writers speak of black spice, galanga, aqua vitae,
Spanish wine, aniseeds and other things as being used for purposes of
adulteration.

Trickery of another kind is revealed in a scene in Chapman's play "A
Humorous Day's Mirth," 1599. A customer at an ordinary says: "Hark
you, my host, have you a pipe of good tobacco?" "The best in the
town," says mine host, after the manner of his class. "Boy, dry a
leaf." Quietly the boy tells him, "There's none in the house, sir," to
which the worthy host replies _sotto voce_, "Dry a dock leaf." But the
diner's potations must have been powerful if they had left him unable
to distinguish between the taste of tobacco and that of dried
dock-leaf.

Sometimes coltsfoot was mixed with tobacco. Ursula, the pig-woman and
refreshment-booth keeper in Bartholomew Fair, in Ben Jonson's play of
that name, says to her assistant: "Threepence a pipe-full I will have
made, of all my whole half-pound of tobacco and a quarter of a pound
of coltsfoot mixt with it too to eke it out."