her husbands having been sailors during the Napoleonic
wars. The old woman, said the journal, "had dwindled into a small
compass, but she was free from pain, retaining all her faculties to
the last, and enjoying her pipe. About a year ago the writer of this
notice paid her a visit, and took her, as a 'brother-piper,' a present
of tobacco, which ingredient of bliss was always acceptable from her
visitors. Asking of her the question how long she had smoked, her
reply was 'Vary nigh a hundred years'!" In 1845 there died at Buxton,
at the age of ninety-six, a woman named Pheasy Molly, who had been for
many years an inveterate smoker. Her death was caused by the
accidental ignition of her clothes as she was lighting her pipe at the
fire. She had burned herself more than once before in performing the
same operation; but her pipe she was bound to have, and so met her
end.

The old Irishwomen who were once a familiar feature of London
street-life as sellers of apples and other small wares at street
corners, were often hardened smokers; and so were, and doubtless still
are, many of the gipsy women who tramp the country. An old Seven Dials
ballad has the following choice stanza--

_When first I saw Miss Bailey,
'Twas on a Saturday,
At the Corner Pin she was drinking gin,
And smoking a yard of clay._

Up to about the middle of Queen Victoria's reign female smoking in the
nineteenth century in England may be said to have been pretty well
confined to women of the classes and type already mentioned.
Respectable folk in the middle and upper classes would have been
horrified at the idea of a pipe or a cigar between feminine lips; and
cigarettes had been used by men for a long time before it began to be
whispered that here and there a lady--who was usually considered
dreadfully "fast" for her pains--was accustomed to venture upon a
cigarette.

In "Puck," 1870, Ouida represented one of her beautiful young men, Vy
Bruce, as "murmuring idlest nonsense to Lilian Lee, as he lighted one
of his cigarettes for her use"--but Lilian Lee was a _cocotte_.

An amusing incident is related in Forster's "Life of Dickens," which
shows how entirely unknown was smoking among women of the middle and
upper classes in England some ten years after Queen Victoria came to
the throne. Dickens was at Lausanne and Geneva in the autumn of 1846.
At his hotel in Geneva he met a remarkable mother and daughter, both
English, who admired