CHAPTER IX. 



CIGAKS. 



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." 



HE 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 

 natives smoking the leaves of a plant, " the perfume of which 

 was fragrant and grateful." But while cigars are of very 

 ancient origin in the "West Indies, they were not generally 

 known in Europe until the beginning of the Nineteenth 

 Century. In fact, of all the various works on gastronomy 

 and the pleasures of the table, written and published from 

 1800 to 1815, not one speaks of this now indispensable 

 adjunct of a good dinner. Even Britlat-Savarin, in his 



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