co-lover. Far be it from us to deny, or even to
question, its value, its utility, or its charm. We have
smoked too many to dream of treating them with
scorn--cigarettes of Virginia shag, strong, pungent,
luscious; of light and fragrant Persian, innocuous and
soothing; cigarettes rolled by ladies' dainty fingers,
compressed by elegant French machines of silk and silver,
cut, stamped, and gummed by prosy, matter-of-fact, and even
vulgar Titanic engines in great tobacco-factories. But the
thorough-paced smoker renders to his cigarette only a
secondary and diluted adoration: it is nice, it is delicate,
it is pretty--a thing to be toyed with, to be fondled, even
to burn one's fingers (or, perchance, one's lips) withal;
but by no means an object to call forth a passion.

"But just as the world would be a tame and an insipid
institution were all men's tastes alike, so the world of
smokers would lose much of its romance were all the lovers
of the weed of temperament too robust to love a cigarette.
Brevity and sweetness are proverbially held to constitute
claims upon the respect and admiration of the voluptuous,
and to the cigarette these cannot be denied. There is
something touching in the self-abnegation of a tobaccoite
who will devote five mortal minutes and the sweat of his
refined intelligence, with the skill of his delicate
fingers, to the preparation of a tiny capsule of the weed,
which burns itself to ashes in five minutes more. There is a
butterfly-beauty about the cigarette to which the cigar and
the pipe can lay no claim--a summer charm to stir the dreamy
rapture of a poet, and to excite the Lotus-eating
philosopher even to analogy. Just as the suns, and flowers,
and balmy zephyrs of a century have gone to form the gauzy,
multi-colored insect that flits across your path throughout
a single summer's day, and then returns to dust and vapor,
so the harvest of West-Indian and East-Asian fields, the
long voyage of the mariner, the merchant's hours of soil,
the steam-power and manual labor of the factory, the
thoughtful calculations of the trader, the skill of the
tissue-paper maker, all have gone, and more than these, to
the creation of a fairy-cylinder of Tobacco, which glows,
delights, expires, and meets its end in ten or fift