246 UNIVERSAL USE. 



Boeial. I believe, in credit to their taste, however, that they 

 really prefer a good cigar, and think it more in keeping with 

 their ideas of manhood and neatness. I have seen young 

 girls of ten * rubbing and chewing,' as if they appreciated it 

 as much as mother Eve did the apple in the garden of 

 paradise. 



" I have also seen old ladies with trembling limbs and few 

 teeth ' rubbing and chewing,' as if it made them feel young 

 again. I have frequently been ushered unexpectedly into 

 the presence of young ladies, and found them puffing their 

 cigarettes in a manner that convinced me that they Toiew how 

 to smoke. There is nothing that will more surely and 

 quickly bring a stranger into the fellowship and good graces 

 of the ladies than to join them in their pet habit of snuff- 

 rubbing. It seems to form a bond of friendship which they 

 regard as sacred as the vows of wedlock. 



" The older matrons * rub ' less and smoke more, which is 

 in accordance with nature and philosophy : The older we 

 grow the more we smoke. They find solid pleasure in sitting 

 by the open grate after tea with fifteen inches of pipe's tail 

 between their teeth, and slowly but gracefully puffing the 

 perfumes of the exhilarating weed into the room, and watch- 

 ing with childish pleasure the hazy curling wreaths of smoke 

 aS they gently float around, changing in form and color until 

 they finally disappear up the chimney, affording rich themes 

 for meditation and profitable study, and perhaps suggestive 

 of earlier days when grandmother, an innocent, blooming 

 maid, was exchanged for the weed, the seed of which pro- 

 duced the plant she is now burning. Everywhere I marked 

 only pleasant and soothing effects from the use of tobacco. 



" The planter is never more indifferent to the ills of life 

 and in sympathy with good feeling and pleasure, than when 

 he sits down after dinner in his vine-thatched portico and 

 lights his pipe, passing to his guests pipes, cigars, and tobacco 

 in various forms, leaving them to choose their favorite mode 

 of using it. Sambo is never more contented than when he 

 burns the weed in a cob pipe, and draws the delicious smoke 

 through an elder sprig or mullen stem. But the maid is 

 happiest of all when with her lover she sits face to face, and 

 they ' dip ' together from the same magic plant tobacco. 



" In every walk of life throughout the sunny South tobacco 

 in some form may be found, and its effects are always the 

 eame, whether drawn from the pocket of the beggar or taken 

 with gloved fingers from the golden tobacco-box of the 



