e operatives from the Lowlands generally
prefer plain Scotch. When two Highlanders meet, they usually exchange
a pinch of snuff, mutually _preeing_ the contents of their _mulls_,
while their _colleys_, (dogs) after a fashion of their own, take a
reciprocal _sniff_ of each other. Cuba is the favorite of the
gentlemen of the stock exchange; the tradesman's box usually contains
rappee; high dried Irish is grateful to those who love to feel the
taste of snuff in their throat. Sea-faring men seldom take snuff: a
sailor with a snuff-box is as rarely to be met with as a sailor
without a knife.

The history of the rise and progress of snuff-taking abounds in
incidents and anecdotes, among the most curious of all that relate to
the various modes of using the weed. Though once the most popular and
fashionable manner of using tobacco it now falls far behind the other
and more common and more popular forms of indulging in the herb. In
France and Spain the introduction of tobacco ushered in this form of
using it, and to inhale a few grains of the pungent dust was the
delight of polished and favored courtiers who regardless of the forms
royalty patronized and gave sanction to the custom. Thus its use in a
short time became popular all over Europe and gave unlimited scope for
the satirist and dramatist to ridicule the habit. In spite, however,
of frown and ridicule this ancient custom though not now as popular or
as fashionable, still claims many sincere votaries and doubtless will
as long as the plant is cultivated or used in any form.

CHAPTER IX.

CIGARS.

"The poet may sing of the leaf of the rose,
And call it the purest and sweetest that blows;
But of all the leaves that ever were tried,
Give me the tobacco leaf rolled up and dried."

The smoking of cigars is now considered the best as it is the most
fashionable mode of using the weed. The word cigar is from the Spanish
_cigarro_, and signifies a cylindrical roll of tobacco leaves, made of
short pieces or shreds of the leaves divested of the stem and wound
about with a binder, and enveloped in a portion of the leaf known by
the name of wrapper--acute at one end and truncated at the other. In
the East Indies a sort of cigar called _cheroot_ is also made with
both ends truncated. The smoking of tobacco in the form of cigars is
doubtless the most general as well as the most ancient mode of its
use. When Columbus landed in Hispaniola, the sailors saw the native