" FAIRY PIPES." 1G1 



p. 68, will show. This may serve as an instance of 

 the mode in which subjects are occasionally " anti- 

 quated." Some other instances will occur in the 

 course of our narrative. 



The smaller j)ipes, termed " fairy-pipes " in Ireland, 

 correspond with the oldest American ones in their 

 capacity for containing tobacco, for it was not the 

 original custom of the Indians to take the weed in 

 large quantities, hence the European imitated his 

 savage instructor. The excessive cost of tobacco when 

 originally imported to Europe, has been adduced as 

 the true reason for this smallness of bowl.* In the 

 middle of the seventeenth century the capacity of the 

 pipe increased with the increased duties on tobacco, 

 and, until the era of Dutch William, kept on enlarging 

 until it appears to have satisfied the most inveterate 

 smoker, though by no means holding so much as the 

 modern Meerschaum. 



The late Thomas Crofton Croker, Esq., author of 

 the Fairy Legends of Ireland, devoted much attention 

 to this subject, and formed a very large collection of 

 pipes, by which he was enabled to generally date them 

 from their form. The very smallest he had obtained 



* On this subject see p. 70. The quantity a pipe would contain may be 

 gathered from a story told of Dr. Butler, temp. Jas. I., by Sir Theodore 

 Mayerne: "A person applying to him who was tormented with ft violent 

 defluxion of his teeth, Butler told him 'a hard knot must be split by a 

 hard wedge,' and directed him to smoke tobacco without intermission till 

 he had consumed an ounce of the herb. The man was accustomed to 

 smoke : he therefore took twenty-five pipes at a sitting, which had the 

 effect of curing him." — Aikin, Biographical Memoirs of Medicine in 

 Great Britain, 1780, p. 19. 



M 



