284. SCIENCE OF LIGHTING. 
and giving out a dark and offensive cloud, while the other 
side remains untouched by the fire, only to wither and crackle 
and twist into uncouth shapes, until the smoker flings the 
cigar away, with an accompaniment of expletives which 
attach rather to his own stupidity than to the piece of to- 
bacco he has so abominably abused. You will see another 
with a good pipe, laden with good tobacco, well lit, blowing 
incessantly down. the mouth-piece and the stem until the 
moisture introduced with his breath into the bowl of his 
pipe effectually prevents the tobacco from burning, and puts 
out the fire; and then you will hear him lament that he 
should have paid so good a price for a pipe so bad that it 
‘fouls’? before he has smokéd a single hour. You will see 
another who, while he talks to his friends, allows his tobacco 
to go out every three or four minutes, so that at length his 
mouth is sore and his palate nauseated with the combined 
fumes of lucifer matches, burnt paper and exhausted tobacco 
dust; and he inveighs against the ‘cabbage-leaf which that 
rascally tobacconist sold him for good Shag or Cavendish.’ 
Another knows s0 little of the art of smoking that he never 
‘stops’ his pipe, and so allows the light dust of the burnt 
weed to fly about him in flakes and minute particles, to the 
ermanent damage of his own and his neighbors’ clothes. 
But in nothing is the inartistic character of Foelish smoking 
80 conspicuously exemplified as in the use of ‘lights.’ Those 
who form the great majority of smokers amongst the Eng- 
lish-speaking races seem to consider that, so long as their 
pipes are set alight, it matters not how or from what source 
the light is obtained. Thus, one will place his pipe-bowl in 
a flame of gas, and pull away at the stem till his tobacco is 
on fire; another will thrust the bowl into the midst of a coal 
fire, and when he sees a glow in the bowl withdraw it, and 
contentedly puff away; another stops an obliging policeman 
or railway guard, and ignites his tobacco by hard pulling at 
the flame of an oil-lamp; another will stick the end of a 
choice cigar into the bowl of a pipe filled with coarsest Shag, 
thus ruining the flavor of his ‘prime Havana’ forever; while 
yet another will light lucifer matches, and apply the blazing 
brimstone to his pipe or cigar, thus saturating the whole 
mass with sulphurous and phosphoretic fumes, to the ruin of 
the weed and the injury of his own health. 
“How much wiser the West Indian negro, who takes a 
burning stick from the wood fire, and tenderly lights. his 
weed therewith, or joyfully brings a handful of the white-hot 
