AMBER MOUTH-PIECES. 159 



taken out of the ground, the roots and branches removed, 

 and the stem bored through after being seasoned for some 

 time. The care shown in rearing insures a perfect straight- 

 ness of stem, and an equable diameter of about an inch or 

 an inch and a half. The last specimens, when cut from the 

 tree, are as much as eight feet in length, dark purple-brown in 

 color, and highly fragrant. At Pesth are made pipes about 

 eighteen inches in length, of the shoots of the mock orange, 

 remarkable for their quality in absorbing the oil of tobacco, 

 they are flexible without being weak. The French make 

 elegant pipe-bowls of the root of the tree-heath, but their 

 chief attention is directed, as far as concerns wood pipes, to 

 those of brier-root, which are made by them in large quanti- 

 ties. The bowl and the short stems are carried out of one 

 piece, and the wood is credited with absorbing some of the 

 rank oil of tobacco. 



Amber the only kind of resin that rises to the dignity of 

 a gem is unfitted for the bowl of a tobacco-pipe, because it 

 cannot well bear the heat ; but it is largely used for mouth- 

 pieces, especially by wealthy Oriental smokers. The Turks 

 have a belief that amber wards off infection; an opinion 

 which, whether right or wrong, tells well for the amber 

 workers. There has always been a mystery connected with 

 this remarkable substance. So far back as the Phenicians, 

 amber was picked up on the Baltic shore of what is now 

 called Prussia ; and the same region has ever since been the 

 chief store-house for it. Tacitus was not far wrong when he 

 conjectured that amber is a gum or resin exuded from certain 

 trees, although other authorities have preferred a theory that 

 it is a kind of wax or fat which has undergone slow petrifac- 

 tion. At any rate, it must at one time have been liquid or 

 semi-liquid ; for insects, flies, detached wings and legs, and 

 small fragments of various kinds, are often found imbedded 

 in it those odds and ends of which Pope said : 



" The things, we know, are neither rich nor rare ; 

 The wonder's how the devil they got there !" 



