ANTIQUITY OF TOBACCO-SMOKING 107 



tumulus and pipe of Bannockstown in Kildare. Stories, 

 fanciful and fairy-like, relating to small pipes found in 

 Irish by-paths, are mentioned in Mr. Crofton Crocker's 

 Fairy Legends of Ireland. The peasant who picked up 

 one of these always knew that it belonged to the 

 Cluricaunes, 'a set of disavin' little derils,' he would 

 explain, ' who were always playing their thricks on good 

 Christians ; ' and with a few words of choice brogue he 

 would break it and throw the bits away. Ireland, 

 however, does not stand alone in that legendary lore 

 wherein pipes have played their little part in life's romance. 

 In Worcestershire there still lingers, or did linger until the 

 scream of the locomotive startled the woods out of their 

 sylvan dream, a fairy tale of Queen Mab having held her 

 court at a spot near old Swinford, where a number of 

 smoking-pipes had been found, so small that none other 

 than fairy fingers could have made them for fairy mouths. 

 So there grew up among the country folk gifted with a light 

 fancy, the belief that Queen Mab had presided at her 

 revels in the dell, distributing among her troop the fairy 

 pipes they had found, while sighing on the breeze, 



Come away elves, while the dew is sweet, 

 Come to the dingles where the fairies meet. 



Leaving the aerial domain of fairy-land, our thoughts are 

 wafted to Central Asia, still in search of an Eastern birth- 

 place for the weed. In the writings of a Hindoo physician, 

 examined by Doctor Mayer of Konisberg in the course of 

 his Eastern researches, it is stated that tobacco was first 

 brought into India by the Franks in the year 1609, that is 

 to say, nearly a century after its introduction into Europe. 

 The date agrees well with the progress the Portuguese had 

 at that time made in establishing themselves in India, 



