278 AMERICAN SMOKERS. 
twentieth of the whole Tobacco produce of the world, and does 
honor to her native weed by being its mightiest consumer, 
why, in the name of all disasters, the product is so dear—ay, 
doubly dear? And thus as his pipe burns low, a hundred 
other statistics; then, knocking out his whitened ashes on 
the floor, he reads sedately (his pipe being out) that the “ To- 
bacco plant. furnishes ashes to the amount of one-fourth of 
its bulk, being a much greater proportion than that of any 
other vegetable product,” and, moreover, that “Tobacco ex- 
hausts the soil at the ratio of fourteen tons of wheat to one 
of Tobacco!” Oh, base insinuation! But, as herelights his 
pipe, and the graceful vapor circles in fresh buoyancy and 
grace before him, he only, in his contented mind, retains that 
one supreme expression—“ One ton of Tobacco!” Ah, 
“Think of it, picture it 
Now, if you can !” 
From “ A’ Paper of Tobacco,” *we extract the following 
humorous description of Yankee cigar smokers, which to a 
certain extent is true to life, but like most of the articles 
descriptive of American life by English Authors, who travel 
in America and write a book afterwards, it is exaggerated or 
overdrawn : . 
“The Americans, who pride themselves on being the fast- 
est-going people on the ‘ versal globe’—who build steamers 
that can out-paddle the sea-serpent and breed horses that can 
trot faster than an ostrich can run—are, undoubtedly, enti- 
tled to take precedence of all nations as consumers of the 
weed. The sedentary Turk, who smokes from morn to night, 
does not, on an average, get through so much tobacco per 
annum, as a right slick, active, go-ahead Yankee, who thinks 
nothing, ‘upon his own relation,’ of felling a wagon-load of 
timber before breakfast, or of cutting down a couple of acres 
corn before dinner. The Americans, itis to be observed, gen- 
erally smoke cigars; and tobacco in this form burns very fast 
away in the open air, more especially when the consumer is 
rapidly locomotive, whether upon his own legs, the back of 
a horse, the top of a coach, the deck of a steamboat, or in an 
open railway carriage. The habit of chewing tobacco is also 
* London, 1889 
