ossibly sweetest.

C.S. CALVERLEY.

Tobacco is once more triumphant. The cycle of three hundred years is
complete. Since the early decades of the seventeenth century, smoking
has never been so generally practised nor so smiled upon by fashion as
it is at the present time. Men in their attitude towards tobacco have
always been divisible into three classes--those who respected and
followed and obeyed the conventions of society and the dictates of
fashion, and smoked or did not smoke in accordance therewith; those
who knew those conventions but disregarded them and smoked as and what
they pleased; and those who neither knew nor cared whether such
conventions existed, or what fashion might say, but smoked as and
what, and when and where they pleased. At the present time the three
classes tend to combine into one. There are, it is true, a few
conventions and restrictions left; but they are not very strong, and
will probably disappear one of these days. There is also, of course,
and always has been, a fourth class of men, who for one reason or
another, quite apart from what fashion may say or do, do not smoke at
all.

Perhaps the most absurd and unmeaning of the restrictions that remain,
is that which at certain times and in certain places admits the
smoking of cigars and cigarettes and forbids the smoking of pipes. The
idea appears to be that a pipe is vulgar. There are few restaurants
now in which smoking is not allowed after dinner; but the
understanding is that cigars and cigarettes only shall be smoked. In
some places of resort there are notices exhibited which specifically
prohibit the smoking of pipes. Why? At a smoking concert where few
pipes are smoked, anyone looking

_Athwart the smoke of burning weeds_

can at once realize how much greater is the volume of smoke from
cigars and cigarettes than would result from the smoking of a like
number of pipes. It cannot, therefore, be that pipes are barred
because of a supposed greater effect upon the atmosphere of the room.
The only conclusion the observer can come to is, that the fashionable
attitude towards pipes is one of the last relics of the old social
attitude--the attitude of Georgian and Early Victorian days--towards
smoking of any kind. The cigar and the cigarette were first introduced
among the upper classes of society, and their use has spread downward.
They have broken down many barriers, and in many places, and under
many and divers co