him coloring his first
(factitious) meerschaum!--also a sad deficiency in his wardrobe of
half-worn clothes. _C'est une pipe qui coute cher a culotter_, the
college meerschaum,--and in more ways than one, according to the
"Autocrat":--"I do not advise you, young man, to consecrate the flower
of your life to painting the bowl of a pipe," _et seq_. More bold,
the Sophomore will smoke openly at home; and by the end of the third
vacation, it is one of those unyielding _faits accomplis_ against which
reformers, household or peripatetic, beat their heads in vain.

Perhaps your husband smokes? If so, at what period of the twenty-four
hours have you invariably found Mr. ---- most lenient to your little
pecuniary peccadilloes? Is he not always most good-natured when his
cigar is about one-third consumed, the ash evenly burnt and adherent,
and not fallen into his shirt-bosom? Depend upon it, tobacco is a great
soother of domestic differences.

Let us, then, look an existing, firmly rooted evil--if you will call it
so--in the face, and see if it is quite so bad as it is represented. It
is too wide-spread to be sneered away,--for we might almost say that
smokers were the rule, and non-smokers the exception, among all
civilized men, Charles Kingsley supports us here:--"'Man a cooking
animal,' my dear Doctor Johnson? Pooh! man is a _smoking_ animal.
There is his _ergon_, his 'differential energy,' as the Aristotelians
say,--his true distinction from the orangoutang. Ponder it well."

_Query_.--What did the old Roman do without a cigar? How idle through
the day? How survive his interminable _post-coenal_ potations?--The
thought is not our own. It occurs somewhere in De Quincey, we believe.
It is one of those self-evident propositions you wonder had not occurred
to you before.--What an accessory of luxury the pipe would have been
to him who passed the livelong day under the mosaic arches of the
_Thermoe_! The _strigiles_ would have vanished before the meerschaum,
had that magic clay then been known. How completely would the _hookah_
and the _narghileh_ have harmonized with the _crater, cyathi_, and
tripods of the _triclinium_ in that portraiture of the "Decadence of
Rome" which hangs in the Luxembourg Gallery! Poor fellows! they managed
to exist without them.

Though pipes are found carved on very old sculptures in China, and the
habit of smoking was long since extensively followed there, according
to Pallas, and although certain