u will see another
with a good pipe, laden with good tobacco, well lit, blowing
incessantly down the mouth-piece and the stem until the
moisture introduced with his breath into the bowl of his
pipe effectually prevents the tobacco from burning, and puts
out the fire; and then you will hear him lament that he
should have paid so good a price for a pipe so bad that it
'fouls' before he has smoked a single hour. You will see
another who, while he talks to his friends, allows his
tobacco to go out every three or four minutes, so that at
length his mouth is sore and his palate nauseated with the
combined fumes of lucifer matches, burnt paper and exhausted
tobacco dust; and he inveighs against the 'cabbage-leaf
which that rascally tobacconist sold him for good Shag or
Cavendish.' Another knows so little of the art of smoking
that he never 'stops' his pipe, and so allows the light dust
of the burnt weed to fly about him in flakes and minute
particles, to the permanent damage of his own and his
neighbors' clothes. But in nothing is the inartistic
character of English smoking so conspicuously exemplified as
in the use of 'lights.' Those who form the great majority of
smokers amongst the English-speaking races seem to consider
that, so long as their pipes are set alight, it matters not
how or from what source the light is obtained. Thus, one
will place his pipe-bowl in a flame of gas, and pull away at
the stem till his tobacco is on fire; another will thrust
the bowl into the midst of a coal fire, and when he sees a
glow in the bowl withdraw it, and contentedly puff away;
another stops an obliging policeman or railway guard, and
ignites his tobacco by hard pulling at the flame of an
oil-lamp; another will stick the end of a choice cigar into
the bowl of a pipe filled with coarsest Shag, thus ruining
the flavor of his 'prime Havana' forever; while yet another
will light lucifer matches, and apply the blazing brimstone
to his pipe or cigar, thus saturating the whole mass with
sulphurous and phosphoretic fumes, to the ruin of the weed
and the injury of his own health.

"How much wiser the West Indian negro, who takes a burning
stick from the wood fire, and tenderly lights his weed
therewith, or joyfully brings a handful of the white-hot