298 BREVITY AND SWEETNESS. 



the epicure nor the solace of the true tobacco-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 treat- 

 ing 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 sec- 

 ondary 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 smok- 

 ers 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 some- 

 thing touching in the self-abnegation of a tobaccoite who will 

 devote five mortal minutes and the sweat of his refined intel- 

 ligence, with the skill of his delicate fingers, to the prepara- 

 tion 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 fac- 

 tory, 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 fifteen fleeting 

 minutes/' 



Although the cigarette is not a favorite with us, still we 

 admire its use as a sort of appendage to a good dinner, and 

 as preparatory work for a " good smoke." The Spaniards 

 have always been great lovers of their minute rolls, and with 



