With the revival of smoking, things changed at Holkham.  On Christmas Day, 1847, Lady Elizabeth, writing to her husband from Holkham, the home of her childhood, remarked:  “The Billiard table is always lighted up for the gentlemen when they come from shooting, and there they sit smoking.”

The growing popularity of the cigar made smoking less unfashionable than it had been among the upper classes of society; but among humbler folk pipe-smoking had never “gone out.”  Every public-house did its regular trade in clays, known as churchwardens and Broseleys, and by other names either of familiarity or descriptive of the place of manufacture; and on the mantelpiece or table of inn or ale-house stood the tobacco-box.  Miss Jekyll, in her delightful book on “Old West Surrey,” figures an example of these old public-house tobacco-boxes which is made of lead.  It has bosses of lions’ heads at the ends, and a portrait in relief on the front of the Duke of Wellington in his plumed cocked hat.  Inside, there is a flat piece of sheet-lead with a knob to keep the tobacco pressed close, so that it may not dry up.

A curious and popular variety of tobacco-box often to be found in rural inns and ale-houses was made somewhat on the principle of the now everywhere familiar automatic machines.  The late Mr. Frederick Gale, in a column of “Tobacco Reminiscences,” which he contributed to the Globe newspaper in 1899, said, that at village outdoor festivals of the ’thirties and early ’forties, respectable elderly farmers and tradesmen would sit “round a table, on which was an automatic, square, brass tobacco-box of large dimensions, into which the smokers dropped a halfpenny and the lid flew back, and the publican trusted to the smoker’s honour to fill his pipe and close the box.”  When the pipes were filled they were lighted by means of tinder-box and flint, and a stable lanthorn supplied by the ostler.  A penny would appear to have been a more usual charge, for a frequent inscription on the lid was: 

The custom is, before you fill, To put a penny in the till; When you have filled, without delay Close the lid, or sixpence pay.

One of these old brass penny-in-the-slot tobacco-boxes was included in the exhibition of Welsh Antiquities held at Cardiff in the summer of 1913.

In the Colchester Museum is an automatic tobacco-box and till of japanned iron.  On the lid of the box is painted a keg of tobacco and two clay pipes; and on that of the till the following doggerel lines: 

A halfpeny dropt into the till, Upsprings the lid and you may fill; When you have filled, without delay, Shut down the lid, or sixpence pay.

A correspondent of Notes and Queries, in 1908, mentioned that he possessed two of these old penny-in-the-slot tobacco-boxes, and had come across another in a dealer’s shop of a somewhat peculiar make, about which he wished to get information.  “It is of the ordinary