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ON SNUFF, AND THE DIFFERENT WAYS OF TAKING IT.

Snuff is a sort of freemasonry amongst those who partake of it.

Those who do not partake of it cannot possibly understand those who do.  It is just the same as music to the deaf—­dancing to the lame—­or painting to the blind.

Snuff-takers will assure you that there are as many different types of snuff-takers as there are different types of women in a church or in a theatre, or different species of roses in the flower-bed of an horticulturist.

But the section of snuff-takers has, in common with all social categories, its apostates, its false brethren.

For as sure as you carry about with you a snuff-box, of copper, of tortoise-shell, or of horn (the material matters absolutely nothing), you cannot fail to have met upon your path the man who carries no snuff-box, and yet is continually taking snuff.

The man who carries no snuff-box is an intimate nuisance—­a hand-in-hand annoyance—­a sort of authorised Jeremy Diddler to all snuff-takers.

He meets you everywhere.  The first question he puts is not how “you do?” he assails you instantly with “Have you such a thing as a pinch of snuff about you?”

It is absolutely as if he said, “I have no snuff myself, but I know you have—­and you cannot refuse me levying a small contribution upon it.”

If it were only one pinch; but it is two—­it is four—­it is eight; it is all the week—­all the month—­it is all year round.  The man who carries no snuff box is a regular Captain Macheath—­a licensed Paul Clifford—­to everyone that does.  He meets you on the highway, and summonses you to stop by demanding “Your snuff-box or your life?”

A man can easily refuse to his most intimate friend his purse, or his razor, or his wife, or his horse; but with what decency can he refuse him—­or to his coolest acquaintance even—­a pinch of snuff?  It is in this that the evil pinches.

The snuff-taker who carries no snuff-box is aware of this—­and woe to the box into which his fingers gain admission to levy the pinch his nose distrains upon.

There is no man who has the trick so aptly at his fingers’ ends of absorbing so much in one given pinch, as the man who carries no snuff box.  The quantity he takes proves he is not given to samples.

Properly speaking he is the landlord of all the boxes in the kingdom.  Those who carry snuff-boxes are only his tenants; and hold them merely by virtue of a rack-rent, under him.