I laid the pipe down and ceased
to smoke--until they had passed.

I will not admit that, once sure it was doing me harm, I could not,
unaided, have given up tobacco. But I was reluctant to make sure. I
should like to say that I left off smoking because I considered it a
mean form of slavery, to be condemned for moral as well as physical
reasons; but though now I clearly see the folly of smoking, I was blind
to it for some months after I had smoked my last pipe. I gave up my
most delightful solace, as I regarded it, for no other reason than that
the lady who was willing to fling herself away on me said that I must
choose between it and her. This deferred our marriage for six months.

I have now come, as those who read will see, to look upon smoking with
my wife's eyes. My old bachelor friends complain because I do not allow
smoking in the house, but I am always ready to explain my position, and
I have not an atom of pity for them. If I cannot smoke here neither
shall they. When I visit them in the old inn they take a poor revenge by
blowing rings of smoke almost in my face. This ambition to blow rings
is the most ignoble known to man. Once I was a member of a club for
smokers, where we practised blowing rings. The most successful got a box
of cigars as a prize at the end of the year. Those were days! Often I
think wistfully of them. We met in a cozy room off the Strand. How well
I can picture it still. Time-tables lying everywhere, with which we
could light our pipes. Some smoked clays, but for the Arcadia Mixture
give me a brier. My brier was the sweetest ever known. It is strange
now to recall a time when a pipe seemed to be my best friend.

My present state is so happy that I can only look back with wonder at
my hesitation to enter upon it. Our house was taken while I was still
arguing that it would be dangerous to break myself of smoking all at
once. At that time my ideal of married life was not what it is now, and
I remember Jimmy's persuading me to fix on this house, because the large
room upstairs with the three windows was a smoker's dream. He pictured
himself and me there in the summer-time blowing rings, with our coats
off and our feet out at the windows; and he said that the closet at the
back looking on to a blank wall would make a charming drawing-room for
my wife. For the moment his enthusiasm carried me away, but I see now
how selfish it was, and I have before me the face of Jimmy when he paid
us his fir