the object, obviously, of smoking it to the bitter end.
Another lady novelist, who is also an authority on tobacco, Miss Rhoda
Broughton, contemptuously dismisses a claimant for the heroship of one
of her stories, as the kind of man who turns up his trousers at the
foot. It would have been just as withering to say that he stuck a
penknife through his cigars.

[Illustration]

There is another true hero with me, whose creator has unintentionally
misrepresented him. It is he of "Comin' thro' the Rye," a gentleman whom
the maidens of the nineteenth century will not willingly let die. He is
grand, no doubt; and yet, the more one thinks about him, the plainer it
becomes that had the heroine married him she would have been bitterly
disenchanted. In her company he was magnanimous; god-like, prodigal;
but in his smoking-room he showed himself in his true colors. Every
lady will remember the scene where he rushes to the heroine's home and
implores her to return with him to the bedside of his dying wife. The
sudden announcement that his wife--whom he had thought in a good state
of health--is dying, is surely enough to startle even a miser out of his
niggardliness, much less a hero; and yet what do we find Vasher doing?
The heroine, in frantic excitement, has to pass through his smoking
room, and on the table she sees--what? "A half-smoked cigar." He was in
the middle of it when a servant came to tell him of his wife's dying
request; and, before hastening to execute her wishes, he carefully
laid what was left of his cigar upon the table--meaning, of course, to
relight it when he came back. Though she did not think so, our heroine's
father was a much more remarkable man than Vasher. He "blew out long,
comfortable clouds" that made the whole of his large family "cough and
wink again." No ordinary father could do that.

Among my smoking-room favorites is the hero of Miss Adeline Sergeant's
story, "Touch and Go." He is a war correspondent; and when he sees a
body of the enemy bearing down upon him and the wounded officer whom he
has sought to save, he imperturbably offers his companion a cigar. They
calmly smoke on while the foe gallop up. There is something grand in
this, even though the kind of cigar is not mentioned.

[Illustration]

I see a bearded hero, with slouch hat and shepherd's crook, a clay pipe
in his mouth. He is a Bohemian--ever a popular type of hero; and the
Bohemian is to be known all the world over by the pipe,