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 species of the tobacco-plant, as the Nicotiana rustica, would appear to be indigenous to the country, yet we have the best reason to conclude that America, if not the exclusive home of the herb, was the birthplace of its use by man.  The first great explorer of the West found the sensuous natives of Hispaniola rolling up and smoking tobacco-leaves with the same persistent indolence that we recognize in the Cuban of the present day.  Rough Cortes saw with surprise the luxurious Aztec composing himself for the siesta in the middle of the day as invariably as his fellow Dons in Castile.  But he was amazed that the barbarians had discovered in tobacco a sedative to promote their reveries and compose them to sleep, of which the hidalgos were as yet ignorant, but which they were soon to appropriate with avidity, and to use with equal zest.  Humboldt says that it had been cultivated by the people of Orinoco from time immemorial, and was smoked all over America at the time of the Spanish Conquest,—­also that it was first discovered by Europeans in Yucatan, in 1520, and was there called Petum.  Tobacco, according to the same authority, was taken from the word tabac, the name of an instrument used in the preparation of the herb.