f a rich mahogany
tint. The outside, also, well polished with sweet oil and
stale milk, then enveloped in chamois leather. The rich dark
coloring is the pledge of your safety--better there than
darkening your own brains.

"The pale gold c'noster and Turkey have now given way to the
splendid varieties of America, and my knowledge halts behind
the age. The black sticks resembling lollipops are said to
be compounds of rum, bullocks' blood and tobacco lees. A
taste for them, when once contracted, is abiding. Fine
volatile tobacco, with aromatic delicacy, requires a long
tube; used in a short pipe of modern fashion, they parch and
shrivel the tongue. In short, what is true of all other
pleasures is also true of tobacco-smoking. Fruition is
sometimes too rapid for enjoyment, as the dram-drinker is
less wise than the calm imbiber of the fragrant vintage of
the Garonne. With Burke's common sense I began, and with it
I end. Depurate vice of all her offensiveness, and you prune
her of half her evil. Let not your love of indulgence be so
inordinate as to purchase short pleasure by impairing
health, neglecting duty, or, while promoting your own
self-complacency, allow yourself to become permanently
revolting to society, by offending more senses as well as
more principles than one.'"

[Illustration: Modern smokers.]

Mantegazza, one of the most brilliant of all writers on tobacco, in
alluding to the enchantment of the "weed," says:--

"If a winged inhabitant of some remote world felt the
impulse to traverse space, and, with an astronomical map, to
fly round our planetary system, he would at once recognize
the earth by the odor of tobacco which it exhales, forasmuch
as all known nations smoke the nicotian herb. And thousands
and thousands of men, if compelled to limit themselves to a
single nervous aliment, would relinquish wine and coffee,
opium and brandy, and cling fondly to the precious narcotic
leaf. Before Columbus, tobacco was not smoked except in
America; and now, after a lapse of a few centuries in the
furthest part of China and in Japan, in the island of
Oceanica as in Lapland and Siberia, rises from the hut of
the savage and from the palace of the prince, along with the
smoke of the fireplace, where man bakes his bread and warms