After such a breakfast, if one may descend into a garden of plain turf, mured about by an occluding wall, with an alley of lime trees for sober pacing:  then and there is the fit time and place for the first pipe of the day.  Pack your mixture in the bowl; press it lovingly down with the cushion of the thumb; see that the draught is free—­and then for your saeckerhets taendstickor! A day so begun is well begun, and sin will flee your precinct.  Shog, vile care!  The smoke is cool and blue and tasty on the tongue; the arch of the palate is receptive to the fume; the curling vapour ascends the chimneys of the nose.  Fill your cheeks with the excellent cloudy reek, blow it forth in twists and twirls.  The first pipe!

But, as I was saying, joy ends not here.  Granted that the after-breakfast smoke excels in savour, succeeding fumations grow in mental reaction.  The first pipe is animal, physical, a matter of pure sensation.  With later kindlings of the weed the brain quickens, begins to throw out tendrils of speculation, leaps to welcome problems for thought, burrows tingling into the unknowable.  As the smoke drifts and shreds about your neb, your mind is surcharged with that imponderable energy of thought, which cannot be seen or measured, yet is the most potent force in existence.  All the hot sunlight of Virginia that stirred the growing leaf in its odorous plantation now crackles in that glowing dottel in your briar bowl.  The venomous juices of the stalk seep down the stem.  The most precious things in the world are also vivid with poison.

Was Kant a smoker?  I think he must have been.  How else could he have written “The Critique of Pure Reason”?  Tobacco is the handmaid of science, philosophy, and literature.  Carlyle eased his indigestion and snappish temper by perpetual pipes.  The generous use of the weed makes the enforced retirement of Sing Sing less irksome to forgers, second-story men, and fire bugs.  Samuel Butler, who had little enough truck with churchmen, was once invited to stay a week-end by the Bishop of London.  Distrusting the entertaining qualities of bishops, and rightly, his first impulse was to decline.  But before answering the Bishop’s letter he passed it to his manservant for advice.  The latter (the immortal Alfred Emery Cathie) said:  “There is a crumb of tobacco in the fold of the paper, sir:  I think you may safely go.”  He went, and hugely enjoyed himself.

There is a Bible for smokers, a book of delightful information for all acolytes of this genial ritual, crammed with wit and wisdom upon the art and mystery we cherish.  It is called “The Social History of Smoking,” by G.L.  Apperson.  Alas, a friend of mine, John Marshall (he lives somewhere in Montreal or Quebec), borrowed it from me, and obstinately declines to return it.  If he should ever see this, may his heart be loosened and relent.  Dear John, I wish you would return that book. (Canadian journals please copy!)