mmer I went off on some business for our company, which
kept me up in the mountains, among the charcoal-burners, three days
longer than I expected. I got out of cigars, and couldn't obtain any
for love or money. In forty-eight hours I was more uncomfortable and
unstrung than I ever was before in all my life. I actually borrowed an
old Irishman's filthy clay pipe, and tried to smoke it. I thought of
that miserable summer we spent crawling about the trenches in
Virginia, and I wished I was there again, with a cigar in my mouth.
Then I began to realize what a shameful bondage I was in to a mere
self-indulgence. I, a man who secretly prided himself on his
self-control, nerve, and manliness,--who never flinched at hard fare
or rough weather,--a downright slave to a bad habit; unnerved and
actually unfit for business for lack of a cigar. It made me angry at
myself; I despised myself for my pusillanimity.

"Going into the matter a little further, I found that the money I had
spent for cigars in a dozen years would have paid for my house and
furnished it. I had smoked away more money than I had laid out for our
library, our periodicals, and our intellectual culture generally.
Cigars had cost me nearly twice as much as I had given to church work,
missions, and charity. My conscience rose up at the record. I knew I
could not plead any equivalent for the outlay; it had not fed me; it
had not strengthened me; it had simply drugged me. Every cigar had
made the next cigar a little more necessary to my comfort. To use the
mildest word, it had been a _useless_ expenditure.

"My detention in the mountains was calculated to open my eyes to my
domestic shortcomings, and I saw, as I never saw before, how selfishly
unsocial tobacco had made me at home. I smoked before I was married,
and my wife never entered any protest against my cigars afterward. But
our first baby was a nervous child, and the doctor told me it would
not do for it to breathe tobacco smoke. So I got in the way of
shutting myself up in the library of evenings, and after meals, to
enjoy my cigars. As I look at it now, nothing is more absurd than to
call smoking a social habit. It's a poor pretense of sociability,
where a man is simply intent on his own enjoyment. My wife owns now,
that my tobacco-tainted breath and tobacco-saturated clothing were
always more or less a trial to her. The satisfaction it has given her
to be rid of a tobacco atmosphere, and the thought of my co