shape,” he wrote, “but differs from any I have previously seen in this respect, that it works with a sixpence, and not with a penny or halfpenny.  It is engraved with the usual lines, except that the user is asked to put sixpence in the till, and then to shut down the lid under penalty of a fine of a shilling.  What could it have been used for that was worth sixpence a time?  Other uncommon features are that the money portion is shallow, and that the part for the tobacco extends the whole length of the box.  I should say that the box is much smaller than any others I have ever seen.”  No information as to the use of this curious box was forthcoming from any of the learned and ingenious correspondents of Notes and Queries; and a problem which they cannot solve may not unreasonably be regarded as insoluble.

Readers of Dickens are familiar with the drawing by Cruikshank which illustrates the chapter on “Scotland Yard” in Dickens’s “Sketches by Boz,” which was written before 1836.  It shows the coal-heavers sitting round the fire shouting out “some sturdy chorus,” and smoking long clays.  “Here,” wrote Dickens, “in a dark wainscoted-room of ancient appearance, cheered by the glow of a mighty fire ... sat the lusty coal-heavers, quaffing large draughts of Barclay’s best, and puffing forth volumes of smoke, which wreathed heavily above their heads, and involved the room in a thick dark cloud.”  These good folk and others of their kin had never been affected by any change of fashion in respect of smoking.  In another of the “Sketches,” the amusing “Tuggs’s at Ramsgate,” when poor Cymon Tuggs is hid behind the curtain, half dead with fear, he hears Captain Waters call for brandy and cigars—­“The cigars were introduced; the captain was a professed smoker; so was the lieutenant; so was Joseph Tuggs.”  Poor Cymon, on the other hand, was one of those who could never smoke “without feeling it indispensably necessary to retire, immediately, and never could smell smoke without a strong disposition to cough.”  Consequently, as the apartment was small, the door closed and the smoke powerful, poor Cymon was soon compelled to cough, which precipitated the catastrophe.  It is noticeable that Dickens speaks of the three worthies as professed smokers, a remark which suggests that such dare-devils, men who would take cigars as a matter of course and for enjoyment, and not merely out of a complimentary acquiescence in some one else’s wish, were comparatively rare.

Other illustrations of folk who smoked, not cigars, but pipes, may be drawn from “Pickwick,” which was published in 1836.  At the very beginning, when Mr. Pickwick calls a cab at Saint Martin’s-le-Grand, the first cab is “fetched from the public-house, where he had been smoking his first pipe.”  At Rochester, Mr. Pickwick makes notes on the four towns of Strood, Rochester, Chatham and Brompton, where the military were present in strength, and hence the observant gentleman noted—­“The consumption