Even Quakeresses sometimes smoked.  A list of the sea-stores put on board the ship in which certain friends—­Samuel Fothergill, Mary Peisly, Katherine Payton and others—­sailed from Philadelphia for England in June 1756, is still extant.  In those days Atlantic passages were long, and might last for an indefinite period, and passengers provisioned themselves accordingly.  On this occasion the passage though stormy was very quick, for it lasted only thirty-four days.  The list of provisions taken is truly formidable.  It includes all sorts of eatables and drinkables in astonishing quantities.  The “Women’s Chest,” we are told, contained, among a host of other good and useful things, “Balm, sage, summer Savoury, horehound, Tobacco, and Oranges; two bottles of Brandy, two bottles of Jamaica Spirrit, A Canister of green tea, a Jar of Almond paste, Ginger bread.”  Samuel Fothergill’s “new chest” contained tobacco among many other things; and a box of pipes was among the miscellaneous stores.

The history of smoking by women through Victorian days need not detain us long.  There have always been pipe-smokers among the women of the poorer classes.  Up to the middle of the last century smoking was very common among the hard-working women of Northumberland and the Scottish border.  Nor has the practice by any means yet died out.  In May 1913, a woman, who was charged with drunkenness at the West Ham police court, laid the blame for her condition on her pipe.  She said she had smoked it for twenty years, and “it always makes me giddy!” The writer, in August 1913, saw a woman seated by the roadside in County Down, Ireland, calmly smoking a large briar pipe.

It is not so very long ago that an English traveller heard a working-man courteously ask a Scottish fish-wife, who had entered a smoking-compartment of the train, whether she objected to smoking.  The good woman slowly produced a well-seasoned “cutty” pipe, and as she began to cut up a “fill” from a rank-smelling tobacco, replied:  “Na, na, laddie, I’ve come in here for a smoke ma’sel.”

The Darlington and Stockton Times in 1856 recorded the death on December 10, at Wallbury, in the North Riding of Yorkshire, in the 110th year of her age, of Jane Garbutt, widow.  Mrs. Garbutt had been twice married, her husbands having been sailors during the Napoleonic wars.  The old woman, said the journal, “had dwindled into a small compass, but she was free from pain, retaining all her faculties to the last, and enjoying her pipe.  About a year ago the writer of this notice paid her a visit, and took her, as a ‘brother-piper,’ a present of tobacco, which ingredient of bliss was always acceptable from her visitors.  Asking of her the question how long she had smoked, her reply was ’Vary nigh a hundred years’!” In 1845 there died at Buxton, at the age of ninety-six, a woman named Pheasy Molly, who had been for many years an inveterate smoker.  Her death was caused by the accidental ignition of her clothes as she was lighting her pipe at the fire.  She had burned herself more than once before in performing the same operation; but her pipe she was bound to have, and so met her end.