246 UNIVERSAL USE. 
social.. 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. 
“T 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 knew 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 wesmoke. 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, ahd 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 vino 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. 
“Tn every walk of life throughout the sunny South tobacco 
in some form may be found,.and its effects are always the 
same, whether drawn from the pocket of the beggar or taken 
with gloved fingers from the golden tobacco-box of the 
