in the practice out of doors, or else, as you say, sneak away to the kitchen when the servants had gone to bed, and puff up the chimney.  It was only in large houses that a billiard room could be found, and even in a billiard room a pipe or cigar was taboo if ladies were present, while smoking-rooms could no more be found in middle-class houses than bath-rooms.  Both cutties and churchwardens were smoked, but the latter of course were not adapted for persons engaged in active pursuits and were essentially of what I may call a sedentary nature.  You could not even walk while holding a long churchwarden in your mouth, and consequently the short clay was most favoured by young men at Sandhurst and the Universities....  Labourers smoked short clays when out of doors, and churchwardens when they rested from their labours and took their ease in their inn in the evenings.”

Mr. Furniss, in the paragraph quoted on a previous page, says:  “No gentleman in those days was seen smoking even a ‘weed’ in the streets.”  The nearest approach to this seems to have been smoking on club steps.  Thackeray, in the seventeenth chapter of the “Book of Snobs,” speaks of dandies smoking their cigars upon the steps of “White’s,” most fashionable of clubs, and, in an earlier chapter, of young Ensign Famish lounging and smoking on the steps of the “Union Jack Club,” with half a dozen other “young rakes of the fourth or fifth order.”  Two of Thackeray’s own drawings in the “Book of Snobs”—­in chapters three and nine—­show men, one civil the other military, smoking cigars out of doors; but as these were no doubt arrant snobs, the drawings may be accepted as proof of Mr. Furniss’s statement.

In this same book Thackeray says ironically—­“Think of that den of abomination, which, I am told, has been established in some clubs, called the Smoking-Room.”  The satirist was very familiar with the smoking-room at the club he loved well—­the “Little G.”—­the Garrick.  The original Garrick club-house was at 35 King Street, Covent Garden, where the club was founded in 1831.  It had formerly been a quiet, old-fashioned family hotel, but apparently was not furnished with a smoking-room, for one of the first acts of the club, when they obtained possession of the house, was to build out over the “leads” a large and comfortable smoking-room.  Shirley Brooks said that this room, which was reached by a long passage from the Strangers’ Dining-room, “was not a cheerful apartment by daylight, and when empty, but which, at night and full, was thought the most cheerful apartment in Town.”  At other clubs of more fashion, perhaps, but certainly of less good-fellowship, smoking-rooms made their way more slowly.  At White’s, smoking was not allowed at all till 1845.  The Alfred Club, founded in 1808, which Lord Byron described as pleasant—­“a little too sober and literary, perhaps, but, on the whole, a decent resource on a rainy day,” and which Sir William Fraser called “a sort of minor