ALL ABOUT TOBACCO.

“The doctors admit snuff’s a hurtful thing, And troubles the brain and sight, But it helps their trade; so they do not say Quite as much as they otherwise might.”—L. H. S.

How much?

Do you know how much money is being squandered to-day, in the United States, in the filthy, health-destroying use of tobacco?

No.

Only $410,958! That’s all.

In Commissioner Wells’s report, it is shown that in the fiscal year ending June 30, 1868, the amount received from the tax on chewing and smoking tobacco was, in round numbers, fifteen million dollars. Add to this the cost of production, and dealers’ profits, which are five times more than the revenue tax, amounting to seventy-five million dollars. The number of cigars taxed was six hundred millions. It is calculated as many more are used through smuggling, making a grand total yearly expenditure in the United States of one hundred and fifty millions of dollars for tobacco alone!

THE IDOL OF TOBACCO USERS.

Give me $410,958 a day, and I will go into the pauper houses of these United States, and bring forth every pauper child; I will go down into the dark, damp cellars, and away into the cobweb-hung attics, and bring forth every ragged child of crime and poverty. I will take all these little bread-and-gospel-starved children, feed, clothe, and send them to school and Sabbath school, the year round, with $410,958 a day.

Christian ministers and professors, think of it! Young men and boys, think of it!Yes, the Americans smoke, snuff, and chew one hundred and fifty million dollars in tobacco annually. The Chinamen consume $38,294,200 worth of opium in a year. The Russians stuff and glut over an unmerciful amount of lard and candles in a year; and the Frenchmen disgust the rest of mankind by eating all the frogs they can catch. Then there are the cannibals of the South Seas—they love tender babies to eat, but not an old tobacco-soaked sailor will they masticate.

Tobacco kills lice, bugs, fops, small boys, and other vermin.

Tobacco fees doctors, and fills hospitals.

Tobacco fills insane asylums and jails.

Tobacco fills pauper houses and graveyards.

Tobacco makes drunkards.

Tobacco and rum go hand and hand; they are one, inseparable; they are twins, yea, Siamese twins, the Chang and Eng of all villanies. I never saw a drunkard who did not first use tobacco. Did you?

John H. Hawkins, the father of Washingtonians, said he never was able to find a drunkard who had not first used tobacco.

Too low a Figure.

Since writing the above I have been variously informed that my figures are too low. The national revenue derived from tobacco in the States for the year ending June, 1871, was $31,350,707.

Cigars.

“According to General Pleasonton, who collected the tax on them, there were 1,332,246,000 cigars used in the United States last year. This one billion three hundred and thirty-two million two hundred and forty-six thousand cigars were undoubtedly retailed at ten cents apiece. So we smoked up in this country, last year, $133,224,600 worth of tobacco.”This does not include pipe-smoking nor chewing tobacco.

The total amount of the vile weed produced in the world annually is as follows:—

Asia,		309,900,000	pounds.
Europe,		281,844,500	"
America,		248,280,500	"
Africa,		24,300,100	"
Australia,		714,000	"
Making a total of,		865,039,100	"

The mighty Army of Invasion.

It is estimated that there are two hundred millions of tobacco-users in the world. What a splendid regiment of sneezers, spewers, smokers, and spitters they would make! They would form a phalanx of five deep, reaching entirely around the world.

Wouldn’t they look gay? Forty millions, with filthy old tobacco pipes stuck in their mouths, “smoking away ‘like devils!’” Eighty millions, with best Havana cigars, made in Connecticut and New York, from cabbage leaf, waste stumps of cigars, and “old soldiers,” thrown away by Irish, Dutch, Italians, French, and Chinese, out of cancerous mouths, whiskey mouths, syphilitic and ulcerous mouths, rotten-toothed mouths—splendid!—protruding from between their sweet lips! Forty millions with pigtail and fine cut, sweet “honey dew,” made as above, scented, grinding away in their forty million human mills! Forty millions, including five millions in petticoats, holding cartridge boxes (of snuff) in their delicate hands, from which they distribute death-dealing ammunition to—their lovely noses!

See them “marching along, marching along,” to the tune that never an “old cow died on” yet, or hogs, or any animal, except he unfortunately became mixed up involuntarily with viler humans,—with jolly banners, blacked in the smoke and stench of great battles, bearing the words “Death to Purity!” “War to the Hilt with Health!” “All hail, Disease, Drunkenness, and Death!”

Splendid picture!

Alas! true picture!

And what do they leave in their wake?

Death to all animal and vegetable life!

The vile spittle and debris dropped by the way have killed all vegetable life. There’s nothing vile and filthy that they have not cursed the ground with.

The following are a few of the articles mixed with various brands of tobacco, as though the original poisonous weed was not sufficiently deleterious: Opium, copperas, iron, licorice,—blacked with lampblack,—the dirtiest refuse molasses, the offal of urine, etc.

The effluvia and smoke arising have killed the foliage and the birds by the wayside, and miles of beautiful forests have been burned away. Nothing but a broad strip of blackened, cursed, and barren waste, remains. To offset this evil there is—nothing.

Now, this army is daily on its march through our land, and I have only begun to mention its depredations. Who will stop it?

Its Names and Nativity.

Tobacco is a native of the West Indies. Romanus Paine, who accompanied Columbus on his second voyage, seems to have been the first to introduce tobacco into Europe as an article of luxury. Paine is said to have lived a vagabond life, and died a miserable death.

The natives called it Peterna. The name tobacco is derived from the town of Tabaco, New Spain. The Latin name, Nicotiana Tabacum, is from Jean Nicot, who was a French ambassador from the court of Francis I. (born the year tobacco was introduced by Paine) to Portugal. On the return of Nicot, he brought and introduced to the French court the narcotic plant, and popularized it in France. Thence it was introduced all over Europe, but encountered great opposition. Sir Walter Raleigh introduced tobacco into England about 1582.

History informs us that a Persian king so strongly prohibited its use, and visited such severe penalties upon its votaries, that many of his subjects fled away to the caves, forests, and mountains, where they might worship this matchless deity free from persecution. The czar prohibited its use in Russia under penalty of death to smokers, mitigating snuff takers’ penalty to merely slitting open their noses.

PUNISHMENT OF THE TURK.

In Constantinople a Turk found smoking was placed upon a donkey, facing the beast’s rump, and with a pipe-stem run through his nose, was rode about the public streets, a sad warning to all tobacco smokers. King James thundered against it. The government of Switzerland sounded its voice against it till the Alps echoed again.

But in spite of opposition and the vileness of the article, it has worked itself into a general use,—next to that of table salt,—and to-day a majority of the adult male population of our Christianized and enlightened United States are its acknowledged votaries.

SMOKERS OF FOUR GENERATIONS.

In the year 1850 I saw in a house in Sedgwick, Me., individuals of four different generations smoking. The old grandmother was eighty-five years old. She smoked. A grandmother, sixty-three, with her husband, smoked. Their son smoked, and had very weak eyes. His two nephews smoked and chewed tobacco. The elder lady died with scrofulous sore eyes, not having, for years before her death, a single eyelash, and her swollen, inflamed eyelids were a sight disgusting to view. All her grand and great grandchildren whom I saw were scrofulous. Some suffered with rheumatism, and all were yellowish or tawny.

Little Children learn to smoke.

I once saw a father teaching his little three-year-old boy to smoke. I knew a boy at Ellsworth who learned to smoke before he could light his pipe. His father, who taught him the wicked habit, was not at all respectable, and had often been jailed for selling rum.

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The following is a sample of the modern John Hay’s style of teaching:—

LITTLE-BREECHES.
“I come into town with some turnips,
And my little Gabe come along—
No four-year-old in the county
Could beat him for pretty and strong;
Peart, and chipper, and sassy,
Always ready to swear and fight,
And I’d larnt him to chaw terbacker,
Jest to keep his milk teeth white.
“The snow come down like a blanket
As I passed by Taggart’s store;
I went in for a jug of molasses,
And left the team at the door.
They scared at something and started—
I heard one little squall,
And hell-to-split over the prairie
Went team, Little-Breeches and all.
“Hell-to-split over the prairie!
I was almost froze with skeer;
But we rousted up some torches,
And sarched for ’em far and near.
At last we struck hosses and wagon,
Snowed under a soft white mound:
Upsot, dead beat—but of little Gabe
No hide nor hair was found.
“And here all hopes soured on me
Of my fellow-critters’ aid—
I jest flopped down on my marrow bones,
Crotch-deep in the snow, and prayed.
By this the torches was played out,
And me and Isrul Parr
Went off for some wood to a sheep-fold,
That he said was somewhar thar.
“We found it at last, and a little shed
Where they shut up the lambs at night;
We looked in, and seen them huddled thar,
So warm, and sleepy, and white.
“And thar sot Little-Breeches, and chirped
As peart as ever you see:
‘I want a chaw of terbacker,
And that’s what’s the matter of me.’”

“I WANT A CHAW OF TERBACKER.”

Whipping School Boys and Girls to make them smoke.

In London, in 1721, Thomas Hearne tells us school children were compelled to smoke. “And I remember,” he says, “that I heard Tom Rogers say that when he was yeoman beadle that year, when the plague raged, being a boy at Eaton, all the boys of his school were obliged to smoke in the school-room every morning, and that he never was whipped so much in his life as he was one morning for not smoking.”

YOUNG SMOKERS.

Some boys, nowadays, would gladly undergo the “flogging” if they could be permitted to enjoy a smoke afterwards.

There are but few people inhabiting the eastern coast, and following fishing for a vocation, who do not smoke or chew tobacco; and their wives and children also smoke.

Sailors are proverbially addicted to smoking and chewing. Their love of tobacco far exceeds their appetite for grog.

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The following letter from a sailor below port to his brother in London explains itself:—

Pure Society.—How a young Man was “took in.”

When a young man is about to be “taken into society,” the question naturally arises, Is the young man, or the society, to be benefited by the accession? As the young man seems anxious to make his debut there, we presume he is to be benefited by the initiation into pure society.

EXAMINATION OF THE SMOKER.

Since nine tenths of the young men are tobacco-users, we will presume safely enough that this young man is one of them. He has used it from five to seven years,—sufficient time to admit of its becoming part and parcel of him.

The young man—“John” is his name—is before the examining committee, who, not being blind or obtuse from the use of the weed themselves, and knowing no young man is fit to enter pure society who uses, or has used, tobacco, without being purified, they submit him to the test, with the following results:—

“His clothes are impregnated with tobacco,” the examiner reports.

“Let them be removed and purified,” is the command.

PURIFYING HIS BLOOD.

They are soaked in alkalies, and soap, and water. They are washed, and boiled, dried, aired, and pressed and pronounced clean, and fit for society.

The committee next examine John’s skin. “It is full of nicotine. It must be cleansed.” So John is taken to the Turkish bath, the most likely place to remove the filth permeating his every pore. Dr. Dio Diogenes puts him through; he is “sweated,” and the great room is scented throughout by the tobacco aroma arising from the ten thousand before clogged-up pores of his skin. He is all but parboiled, then soaped and scrubbed, rubbed, and then goes into the plunge bath. The fishes are instantly killed. The canary bird in the next room is suffocated by the effluvia penetrating to his cage. The young man is wiped again, dried, and cooled.

Again the committee smell. John is not yet pure. The nicotine is “in his blood,” says Dr. Chemistry. A faucet is introduced into John’s aorta, and his blood drawn off into a bucket for the chemist to analyze and purify of tobacco. Still the flesh is full of nicotine, and it must be removed and purified. It is too late for John to object, and the fact cannot be denied that the poison is in his muscle; so he is stripped of the integuments to his framework.

CLEANSING HIS BONES.

The committee now examine the bony structure.

In Germany they have recently dug up the bones of tobacco-users who have been dead years, and found nicotine (tobacco principle) in them. May not this man’s bones be full of nicotine, which will come out through, if we replace the integuments, blood, and garments?

“The bones must be subjected to purification,” said the judge.

They are soaked in alkalies, boiled in acids, and sufficient nicotine is extracted to kill five men not hardened in the tobacco service.

Thus, and only thus, could John have been purified from his vile habit and its results, and fitted for decent male society, female society, and Christian society. There is said to be one other place where John can possibly have the nicotine of seven years’ deposit taken out of him. It is a very warm place, and the principal chemical ingredient used is said to be sulphuric, and kept up to a boiling point by means of infernal great fires.

Delicious Morsels.

Nicotine is the active principle of tobacco, expressed chemically thus: C¹⁰ H⁸ N. One fourth of a drop will kill a rabbit, one drop will kill a large dog. It is a virulent poison, the intoxicating principle of prepared tobacco. It is not in the natural leaf. It results from fermentation. Two little boys were overheard discussing tobacco merits and demerits. One was in favor of tobacco, the other “anti.” “Why,” said anti, “it’s so poisonous that a drop of the oil, put on a dog’s tail, will kill a man in a minute.” It is the opium in the best Havanas which enslaves the smokers more than the tobacco. Those cigars, also American manufactured cigars, are dipped in a solution of opium. It is said that twenty thousand dollars’ worth of opium is used annually in one cigar manufactory in Havana.

The Street Nuisance.

“I knew, by the smoke that so lazily curled
From his lips, ’twas a loafer I happened to meet;
And I said, “If a nuisance there be in the world,
’Tis the smoke of cigars on a frequented street.”
“It was night, and the ladies were gliding around,
And in many an eye shone the glittering tear;
But the loafer puffed on, and I heard not a sound,
Save the sharp, barking cough of each smoke-stricken dear.”

THE SMOKER.

Here is a “blow” from Horace Greeley. “I do not say that every chewer or smoker is a blackguard; but show me a blackguard who is not a lover of tobacco, and I will show you two white blackbirds.” Good enough for Horace.

Now, admitting that there are gentlemen who smoke and chew on the streets, how are ladies, or the people, to know that they are such, since the loafer, the blackguard, the thief, the pickpocket, the profaners of God’s name (all), the blackleg, the murderers bear the same insignia of their profession? At one time, every man incarcerated in the Connecticut state prison was a tobacco-user; nearly all, also, at the Maine, Vermont, and Massachusetts prisons.

It is quite lamentable to see how liable tobacco-using is to convert a thorough gentleman into a selfish, dirty blackguard, who will promenade the streets, chatting with some boon companion, while the pair go recklessly along, blowing their offensive smoke directly into ladies’ faces, their ashes into their beautiful eyes, and spitting their filthy saliva directly or indirectly over costly dresses, thinking only of self!

The Man who chews.

Behold the picture of the man who chews!
A human squirt-gun on the world let loose.
A foe to neatness, see him in the streets,
His surcharged mouth endangering all he meets.
The dark saliva, drizzling from his chin,
Betrays the nature of the flood within.
Where, then, O where, shall Neatness hope to hide
From this o’erwhelming of the blackened tide?
Shall she seek shelter in the house of prayer?
A hundred squirting mouths await her there.
The same foul scene she’s witnessed oft before,—
A solemn cud is laid at every door!
The vile spittoon finds place in many a pew,
As if one part of worship were to chew!

THE CHEWER.

Another Street Nuisance.

Speaking of President Grant and his cigar, a writer says,—

“Not only do smoky editors take advantage of this weakness of our president, but tobacconists, greedy of gain, are subjecting it to their sordid purposes. Hitherto these gentlemen have insulted the public taste by posting at their shop doors some savage, some filthy squaw, or some unearthly image, to invite attention to their cigars and ‘negro head tobacco.’ And all this seemed appropriate. But cupidity is audacious, and they now insult American pride by installing at their doors a full, life-like, wooden bust of General Grant offering to passing travellers a cigar. Emblems of majesty are not rare. We have Jupiter with his thunderbolt, Hercules with his club, Ahasuerus with his sceptre, Washington with his Declaration of Independence, Lincoln with his Proclamation of Liberty to four millions, and now, in this year of our Lord, we have President Grant and his cigar!

SIGN OF THE TIMES.

It begets Laziness and national Ruin.

Sir Benjamin Brodie, a distinguished physician of London, says, “A large proportion of habitual smokers are rendered lazy and listless, indisposed to bodily and incapable of much mental exertion. Others suffer from depression of the spirits, amounting to hypochondriasis, which smoking relieves for the time, though it aggravates the evil afterwards....

“What will be the result, if this habit be continued by future generations?”

Tobacco is ruining our nation. Its tendency is to make the individual user idle, listless, and imbecile. Individuals make up the nation. Those nations using the most tobacco are the most rapidly deteriorating.

Once the ships of Holland ploughed the waters with a broom at the mast-head, emblematic of her power to sweep the ocean. Behold her now! “Her people self-satisfied, content with their pipes, and the glories once achieved by their grandfathers.” Look at the Mexicans, and the lazzaroni of Italy. “Spain took the lead of civilized nations in the use of tobacco; but since its introduction into that country, the noble Castilian has become degenerated, his moral, intellectual, and physical energies weakened, paralyzed, and debased. The Turks, descendants of the warlike Saracens, are notoriously known as inveterate smokers. And to-day they are characterized as an enervated, lazy, worthless, degenerate people.”

Go about the shops, and bar-rooms, and billiard-halls of our own community, and see our lazzaroni. What class do they principally represent—the active and virtuous, or the idle and vicious?

MY LAZY SMOKING FRIEND.

A young man greatly addicted to smoking, and who, to my knowledge, was exceedingly lazy, was seated by the writer’s fireside, listless and idle, save barely drawing slowly in and out the tobacco smoke of an old pipe, when, after repeated requests of his sister that he should go out to the shed and bring in some wood to replenish the dying embers, she got out of patience with him, and exclaimed,—

“There, Ed, you’re the laziest fellow I ever saw, sitting there and smoking till the fire has nearly gone out, on a cold day like this.”

“Ugh!” he grunted, and slowly added, “I once heard tell of a lazier boy than I am, sister.”

“How could that be possible? Do tell me,” she exclaimed, impatiently.

“Well, you see,”—spitting on the floor,—“when he came to die, he couldn’t do it. He was too lazy to draw his last breath, and they had to get a corkscrew to draw it for him.”

“SHALL I ASSIST YOU TO ALIGHT?”

WORK FOR TONGUES AND FINGERS.

“You think it smart and cunning, John,
To use the nauseous weed;
To make your mouth so filthy then,
It were a shame indeed.
To smoke and chew tobacco, John,
Till your teeth are coated brown,
Making a chimney of your nose,
And of yourself a clown,—
“Yes, that would be so cunning, John,—
The girls will love you so;
Your breath will smell so sweet,
They’ll want you for a beau.
Because you use tobacco, John,
You think yourself a man;
But the girls will find it out, John,
Disguise it all you can.”

“Shall I assist you to alight?” asked one of those nice young men who loaf about country hotel doors, smoking a villanous cigar, of a buxom country lass, on arrival of the stage.

“Thank you, sir,” said the girl, with irony, and a jump, “but I never smoke.”

Black Eyes and Fingers.

An American traveller visiting the greatest cigar manufactory in Seville, Spain, says, amongst other things,—

“Here were five thousand young girls, all in one room,—and Sevillians, too,—in the factory. They are all old enough to be mischievous, and ‘put on airs.’ I doubt if as many black eyes can be seen in any one place as in this factory. Their fingers move rapidly, and their tongues a little faster. The manufactories consume ten thousand pounds of tobacco per day.

“I have often heard that a woman’s weapon is her tongue, and that the sex were notorious for using it; but, like many other unkind statements against Heaven’s best, last gift to man, I doubted it until I peeped into the Fabrico de Tabacos of Seville. What must be the weight of mischief manufactured each day along with the cigars, I don’t know, but I feel safe in stating that it is at least equal with the tobacco. This factory was erected in 1750, is six hundred and sixty feet long by five hundred and twenty-five wide, and is surrounded by a mole. It is the principal factory in the kingdom, as every one uses tobacco in some shape in Andalusia, not excepting the ladies; but it is when they are on the shady side of forty that they puff and cogitate. Snuff, cigars, and cigarettes are all manufactured here. The best workers among the girls earn about forty cents per day, the poorest about half that amount. Every night they are all searched.”

Disease and Insanity.

Tobacco helps to fill our insane asylums. Dr. Butler, of Hartford, and others, have assured me of the fact. “I am personally acquainted with several individuals, now at lunatic asylums, whose minds first became impaired by the use of tobacco.”

“In France, the increase in cases of lunacy and paralysis keeps pace, almost in exact ratio, with the increase of the revenue from tobacco. From 1812 to 1832, the tobacco tax yielded 28,000,000f., and there were 8000 lunatic patients. Now the tobacco revenue is 180,000,000f., and there are 44,000 paralytic and lunatic patients in French asylums. Napoleon and Eugenie, assisted by their subjects, smoked out five million pounds of tobacco the year before they went on their travels. Take notice. As ye sow, so also reap.”

Sir Benjamin Brodie, before quoted, says, “Occasionally tobacco produces a general nervous excitability, which in a degree partakes of the nature of delirium tremens.”

The Meerschaum. A Sonnet.

“The gorgeous glories of autumnal dyes;
The golden glow that haloes rare old wine;
The dying hectic of the day’s decline;
The rainbow radiance of auroral skies;
The blush of Beauty, smit with Love’s surprise;
The unimagined hues in gems that shine,—
All these, O Nicotina, may be thine!
But what of thy bewildered votaries?
How fares it with the more precious human clay?
Keeps the lip pure, while wood and ivory stains?
Stays the sight clear, while smoke obscures the day?
Works the brain true, while poison fills the veins?
Shines the soul fair where Tophet-blackness reigns?
Let shattered nerves declare! Let palsied manhood say!”
J. Ives Pease.

Uses and Abuses of Tobacco.

In our opening remarks on tobacco, we stated some of the uses of tobacco, such as killing bugs and lice on plants, vermin on cattle, etc. It prevents cannibals from eating up our poor sailors; and, in the Mexican war, it was ascertained that the turkey buzzards would not eat our dead soldiers who were impregnated with tobacco!

Dean Swift published a pamphlet, in his day, showing how the superfluity of poor children could be made an article of diet for landlords who had already consumed the parents’ substance. All may not admit that there is a superfluity of children and youth in the larger towns and cities of our country. A New York paper says that “five thousand young men might leave New York city without being missed.” Now for our argument. “Like begets like.” The lamb feeds upon pure hay or sweet grass. It is the emblem of purity; it represented Christ. The lion and tiger have only tearing teeth, and subsist upon animal food, and they are of a wild, ferocious nature. Man stuffs himself with tobacco poison. It becomes a part of him,—muscle, blood, bone! Like begets like, and behold the tobacco-user’s children, puny, yellow, pale, scrofulous, rickety, and consumptive. Many years ago it was estimated that twenty thousand persons died annually in the United States from the use of tobacco. Nine tenths begin with tobacco catarrh, go on to consumption, and death.

“The diseased, enfeebled, impaired, and rotten constitution of the parent is transmitted to the child, which comes into the world an invalid, and then, being exposed more directly to the poisonous effects of this pernicious habit of the parent, its struggle for life is exceedingly short, and in less than twelve months from its birth it sickens, droops, and dies, and the milkman’s adulterated milk, especially in cities, is often made the scape-goat for this uncleanly, if not sinful habit of the parent.”

If it is true that the wicked mostly make up the tobacco-consumers, you perceive by this, that like the prisons and gallows, tobacco catches and kills off the superfluous wicked population and their offspring. The sins of the parents are visited upon their children, and what a host of puny, wretched, and wicked little children tobacco helps to rid the world of. Selah!

Tobacco worse than Rum.

Tobacco is worse than rum because, by its begetting a dryness of the throat and fauces, it creates an appetite for strong drink. It is too evident to need corroboration. 1. “Rum intoxicates.” So does tobacco. “Intoxication” is from the Greek en (in) and toxicon (poison). Therefore, when any perceptible poison is in the person, he is intoxicated. 2. “Alcohol blunts the senses, and ruins many a fair intellect.” So does tobacco. But since the ruined drunkard used tobacco, how do you know it was not tobacco which ruined him? Come, tell me! 3. “Rum makes a man miserable.” So does tobacco. The user is in Tophet the day he is out of the weed. 4. “Whiskey makes paupers.” So does tobacco. I knew a whole family who went to the Brooklyn, Me., pauper house one winter, when, if the father and mother had not used tobacco, they could have been in health and prosperity. 5. “Rum makes thieves.” So does tobacco. Men have been known to steal tobacco when they would not have stolen bread. 6. “It makes murderers.” Where is the murderer of the nineteenth century who was not a tobacco-user, and an excessive user at that, from George Dennison, who on the drop asked the sheriff for a chew of tobacco, to Stokes, in his New York cell, surrounded by a cloud of tobacco smoke, awaiting the decision of the jury to ascertain if it was really he who shot the “Prince of Erie”?

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WHAT KILLED THE DOG?

You can’t always tell just what kills a man, or a dog, as the following story proves:—

“An old farmer was out one fine day looking over his broad acres, with an axe on his shoulder, and a small dog at his heels. They espied a woodchuck. The dog gave chase, and drove him into a stone wall, where action immediately commenced. The dog would draw the woodchuck partly out from the wall, and the woodchuck would take the dog back. The old farmer’s sympathy getting high on the side of the dog, he thought he must help him. So, putting himself in position, with the axe above the dog, he waited the extraction of the woodchuck, when he would cut him down. Soon an opportunity offered, and the old man struck; but the woodchuck gathered up at the same time, took the dog in far enough to receive the blow, and the dog’s head was chopped off on the spot. Forty years after, the old man, in relating the story, would always add, with a chuckle of satisfaction, ‘And that dog don’t know, to this day, but what the woodchuck killed him!’”

We regret our want of space to ventilate tobacco more thoroughly.

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