W.D. or H.O.

Three men were on a walking tour of Norway. Two were of the ordinary type, the third was a man who rarely spoke, consumed much tobacco, and when he did speak, had always something to say worth listening too. Their road led them one day past a pleasantly situated house at the door of which was standing an unmistakable Englishman. 'Whose house is that?'asked one of the men of a passer-by. 'That is the house of a member of the firm of W.D. & H.O. Wills, the great English Tobacconists,' was the reply.(In English of course) The trio walked on. Some hours after, one of the men addressed the smoker, who had taken no part in the conversation with the passer-by and who had not spoken since.'Well, Smoker, what are you thinking about now?' 'What am I thinking?' said Smoker, without removing his pipe from his mouth. 'I was wondering whether that man at the door was W.D. or H.O.'

A Soft Answer.

A Father was thunderstruck one day, suddenly to come upon his son aged ten, standing on a street corner puffing away at a cigarette with all the assurance of a suffragette. 'Bless my eyes, you young scamp!' he ejaculated, raising his stick threateningly. 'Why, what's the matter father?' coolly questioned the young hopeful. 'Matter!' exploded the irate parent. 'How dare you smoke to my very face?' 'Oh!' exclaimed the youth as though suddenly enlightened, 'This isn't my cigarette, father, I'm just keeping it alight for Jimmy Green, he's run in to see his mother.' How true it is that a soft answer works wonder with wrath.

Raleigh, The Pioneer.

What a prodigious smoker Sir Walter was, we may gather from the size of his tobacco-box. This most interesting relic was in 1719 carefully preserved in the museum of a Mr. Ralph Thoresby, of Leeds. The box was cylindrical in form, and no less than seven inches in diameter and thirteen inches high. It was intended to hold somewhat over a pound of tobacco, and it was surrounded by a sort of collar containing holes to receive pipes. What a mighty pioneer he was.
Tobacco was first brought into repute in England by Sir Walter Raleigh. By the caution he took in smoking it privately, he did not intend it should be copied. But sitting one day in deep meditation with a pipe in his mouth, he inadvertently called to his man to bring him a tankard of small-beer. The fellow, coming into the room, threw all the liquor into his master's face, and, running downstairs, bawled out,'Fire! Help! Sir Walter has studied till his head is on fire, and the smoke bursts out at his mouth and nose!'

Milton, A Smoker.

The great poet Milton was a smoker. During the latter period of his life when composing 'Paradise Lost,' he invariably wound up a full day by indulging in a pipe of tobacco. We learn from John Aubrey's most interesting account of the poet that he rose early:at four in the summer, at five in the winter: and began the day by listening to a chapter or two from the Hebrew Scriptures (he was then blind). Then he contemplated. At seven his man: his paid secretary: came to him and read to him and wrote till dinner. Exercise in the form of walking in his garden followed. The afternoon was commonly devoted to music, of which he was still passionately fond. He played both the bass-viol and the organ, and sometimes he would sing to himself, and sometimes his wife would sing to him.
After this, he again listened to reading till six; and between six and eight he received his friends. Conversation he greatly enjoyed: his own talk, we are told was 'extreme pleasant'; his youngest daughter, Deborah, the only one of his children who ever spoke of him with any tenderness, declared that he was 'delightful company, the soul of conversation,' by reason of a flow of subject and an unaffected cheerfulness and civility'. It is perhaps a little surprising to learn of a vein of humour often enlightened his talk.
At eight he took his supper,'of olives or some light thing,' for in eating and drinking he was extremely abstemious, and, having smoked a pipe of tobacco and drunk a glass of water, he went to bed at nine. Such was his simple and praiseworthy way of life.

We all do it.

It would be interesting to learn what is the average age at which a smoker first comes to the conclusion that he ought to give up smoking. For, of course, every smoker does come to that conclusion sooner or later. Probably he is well into middle life before the first serious qualm comes. He has travelled his best days in the company of Nicotine; and he feels that his best days would not have been his best days had it not been for her fragrant society.
When he recalls himself of twenty years ago the happy ignoramus that was himself before the whirling machinery of life entangles him,the young man who comes up in the picture always carries a pipe between his lips. It seems to dwell naturally among the other features of his foolish, happy face. It not only shared those calm and glowing times, but it inspired most of the glory of them. It is the clue to the whole picture, like the signature of the artist. But the time when the smoker's feelings change towards his pipe arrives inexorably.
In some subtle way the pipe has become different from what it was. He misses the old flavour, and no alteration of mixture succeeds in restoring it. It doesn't draw well, no matter how assiduously he pushes feathers down the stem. Strange pains rive his chest before the pipe is half smoked. He can't account for the alteration, either. At first he puts it down to liver or kidney trouble, until it is borne upon him that he never notices his liver or his kidney except when he is smoking, or immediately afterwards.

'Yes'
he tells himself sadly, 'I shall have to give up smoking.' It is an awful moment. I have known a man to declare: 'I must turn down Ethel' ( or whatever the girl's name might be at the time), and to do it straight away with no more compunction than is expressed by a shrug of the shoulders; and the same man has broken out into a cold sweat of agitation, as he told me that he felt sure he would have to give up his pipe.
The fact it, a man keeps a very special kind of affection for his pipe, of much the same character as that which he keeps for his dog. Pipes and dogs have many points of resemblance. They are the only friends of man over whom he has absolute authority. He can do what he likes with his pipe and his dog; neither of them will question his right, and thus there results that rarest thing, a friendship unbroken by strife. Here I become conscious of jeers from the ladies. Did you ever know a woman who really understood a man's attitude towards pipes and dogs. It is, to them, one of the mysteries of our sex; and since it serves the useful purpose of feeding their curiosity about us, the wise man will suffer their derision with equanimity.
To return to the matter in hand. The smoker arrives at the dreadful moment in his career when he is convinced that he will have to give up his pipe. He spends weeks in reviewing the situation from all its aspects, weighing up the pros and cons, balancing the advantages against the disadvantages, and smoking furiously all the time. Smoking you see is a great aid to the concentration of the mind upon a particular subject. Meanwhile the flavour of his pipe gets steadily worse; it draws more and more foully, and the pains in his chest increase. To console himself for these grave distresses he is obliged to smoke more than ever. At the end of all this deliberation, he is confirmed in his opinion that he really must give it up, and he turns his mind to the question of how to do it.
Now, there are numerous ways of giving up smoking, none of which, I am happy to say, necessarily involve giving up. True, I have heard of men, who having declared their intention to give up smoking, have never touched a pipe from that moment; but I have never met them, any more than I have ever met a man who has actually seen a ghost. Nor do I want to meet such men. Cold and calculating brutes, they must needs be, callous and inhuman. I should be sorry to be obliged to ask the loan of half-a-crown from any man of that stamp.
But I am familiar with the plan known as the gradual system. This is the method by which you knock off smoking at the rate of one pipe, or even two pipes, a week, and it has many recommendations. For one thing, the process takes such a long time that before you have reduced yourself to really short commons something is almost sure to turn up rendering any further abstention unnecessary. Your liver recovers, very likely, or your kidneys retire into decent oblivion. Some smokers give up smoking by reducing not the number of their pipes but their allowance of tobacco. Instead of smoking eight ounces a week they resolve to smoke seven and a half a week the first week, seven the nest, six and a half the next, and so on. This plan may be safely recommended, because when you have reached the end of your allowance (by Thursday afternoon, say) there is nothing to prevent you making shift with cigars till first thing Monday morning, when you can begin on the pipe again. Cigars don't count.
On consideration, I really think this is a better plan than reducing the number of pipes. Another idea which finds favour in some quarters is that of acquiring a distaste for tobacco by sucking acid drops. The flavour of the acid drops, it is said, makes tobacco unpleasant to the palate; and I can well believe it. But the idea does not commend itself to me. It seems a mean trick to play on an old pal. If a man cannot part friends with is pipe, after all the good times he has had with it, I hold that he ought not to part with it at all. Besides, it is a question whether the initial necessity of acquiring a taste for acid drops is worth the supposed advantages that are to follow from giving up smoking. personally, I feel sure that acid drops would not stop at giving me a distaste for tobacco: they would turn my stomach against all other kinds of food. Regarded as hors d'oeuvres , acid drops would only succeed in blasting what little pleasure in existence would be left me after dropping my pipe.
The plan of leaving all one's smoking tackle at home before going out in the morning is a good deal advocated; but experience teaches me that it very seldom works. You simply buy a cheap pipe about noon, and fill it from the paper ounce-packet that you buy at the same time. I have seven pipes in my rack. Number two was bought as the result of leaving number One at home; number Three as the result of leaving numbers One and Two at home; Number Four as the result of leaving numbers One,Two, and Three at home; and so on. From number Two onward each pipe represents a victory for the flesh, a triumph of the evil one. Arrayed en masse in the rack their effect is a crushing discouragement to virtue, a damaging advertisement of the irresistible power of the devil. Moreover, they represent so much money thrown away, for being cheap pipes they are very little good. A little more than half the money spent on those six cheap pipes would have bought me one really good one.