CHAPTER IX. 
CIGARS. 
“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.” 
We HE smoking of cigars is now considered the best 
as it is the most fashionable mode of using the weed. 
yes 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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