Now we approach the crux and pinnacle of this inquirendo into the art and mystery of smoking.  That is to say, the last pipe of all before the so-long indomitable intellect abdicates, and the body succumbs to weariness.

No man of my acquaintance has ever given me a satisfactory definition of living.  An alternating systole and diastole, says physiology.  Chlorophyl becoming xanthophyl, says botany.  These stir me not.  I define life as a process of the Will-to-Smoke:  recurring periods of consciousness in which the enjoyability of smoking is manifest, interrupted by intervals of recuperation.

Now if I represent the course of this process by a graph (the co-ordinates being Time and the Sense-of-by-the-Smoker-enjoyed-Satisfaction) the curve ascends from its origin in a steep slant, then drops away abruptly at the recuperation interval.  This is merely a teutonic and pedantic mode of saying that the best pipe of all is the last one smoked at night.  It is the penultimate moment that is always the happiest.  The sweetest pipe ever enjoyed by the skipper of the Hesperus was the one he whiffed just before he was tirpitzed by the poet on that angry reef.

The best smoking I ever do is about half past midnight, just before “my eyelids drop their shade,” to remind you again of your primary school poets.  After the toils, rebuffs, and exhilarations of the day, after piaffing busily on the lethal typewriter or schreibmaschine for some hours, a drowsy languor begins to numb the sense.  In dressing gown and slippers I seek my couch; Ho, Lucius, a taper! and some solid, invigorating book for consideration.  My favourite is the General Catalogue of the Oxford University Press:  a work so excellently full of learning; printed and bound with such eminence of skill; so noble a repository or Thesaurus of the accumulated treasures of human learning, that it sets the mind in a glow of wonder.  This is the choicest garland for the brain fatigued with the insignificant and trifling tricks by which we earn our daily bread.  There is no recreation so lovely as that afforded by books rich in wisdom and ribbed with ripe and sober research.  This catalogue (nearly 600 pages) is a marvellous precis of the works of the human spirit.  And here and there, buried in a scholarly paragraph, one meets a topical echo:  “THE OXFORD SHAKESPEARE GLOSSARY:  by C.T.  ONIONS:  Mr. Onions’ glossary, offered at an insignificant price, relieves English scholarship of the necessity of recourse to the lexicon of Schmidt.”  Lo, how do even professors and privat-docents belabour one another!

With due care I fill, pack, and light the last pipe of the day, to be smoked reverently and solemnly in bed.  The thousand brain-murdering interruptions are over.  The gentle sibilance of air drawn through the glowing nest of tobacco is the only sound.  With reposeful heart I turn to some favourite entry in my well-loved catalogue.