St. Landry democrat. (Opelousas, La.) 1878-1894, 1883-10-27
The Weed Among the Beers and Chi
nese.


The Beers grow and manufacture a
tobacco of their own which is of such a
detestable odor to civilized man that
remember during the Zulu war we used
to tip the Kaffir or Afrikander drivers
of mail-carts not to smoke except dur
ing the halts at stages, and then always
to leeward. 1t was no use to offer
them our superior article, for the
dreadful Dutchmen scorned it as trash.
Equally odious is the ordinary tobacco
of the Chinese. The Boer stuff smells
rank and green and acrid; but the Ce-
lestial has heavy, clinging. clogging
odor that suggests opium in the COM
position. The South African leaf when
ready for consumption looks like
crumbled hay, with miscellaneous dead
garden-rubbish and the sweepings of a
conservatory added. 1t is full of twigs
and knots and threads of vegetable mat
ter, and is of a general greenish-gray
tint. The Chinese, on the other hand,
is curiously soft; it lifts up in silky skeins
of exquisitely fine hair-like strands, and
is of deep chicory-color, and resem-
bles some vegetable fiber stepped in
iaggery rather than tobacco leaf. The
Boer tobacco blows out of the pipe-it
is so dry and vagrant; but the other
pads down into the pipe close and firm,
and the bowl has to be filled as lightly
as possible in order to obtain any
draught at all. To smoke pipe of the
former is to scorch the tongue and to
go about all day with the taste of Tur-
Key rhubarb in your mouth; to venture
on the latter is to enjoy cool, highly
aromatic pipe. with the subsequent pen
atty Of giddiness and sick-headache, as
after laundering administration OF
chloroform. It requires only an eff
fort of the stomach to return to
Boer tobacco a second time; to re-
turn to Chinese a second time you
must turn Chinaman. In singular con-
trast to both these disagreeable herbs is
the tobacco of the red Indian, which is
both light and fragrant-even when
there is no tobacco in it. For the saw
age can not always obtain the precious
leaf; and very often when he can, econ
omy and, it may be, taste leads him to
adulterate it with various vegetable sub.
stances of pleasant flavor. The mos:
usual is the inner bark of the red will
low, which I have helped Navajo In
dams. in the valley of the Rio Virgin,
to prepare in the following way: The
Young withes of the willow are cut
into lengths of about two feet; the outer
bark is removed, and the inner is then
peeled up in long strips, one end being
left adhering to the withes. These are
then stuck into the ground round a
charcoal fire, and kept there till the
strips of bark, hanging down in a
fringe, shrivel up with the heat and
curl themselves into crisp ringlets
round the upper ends. When they
seem sufficiently dry they are crumbled
up in the hand into pieces of the size Of
ordinary bran. To this, it the shrub
grows in the vicinity, the smoked leaves
| of a species of sumach is added, which
are simply prepared by roasting them
over the cinnders and then crumbling
them. If, finally, leaf of tobacco
be crushed up and mingled with the
willow and sumach, smoking MKT
ure' of an agreeable aromatic flavor
and fragrance and of harmless mildness
| is obtained. tt smoked, to correct the
heat, in q long-stemmed pipe, ending in
a capacious cylindrical bowl Of clay,
which, compared with the small reed
stemmed opium pipe kind of instru-
ment which the Celestial favors, or the
villainously unclean dhudeeen OF the
Boer, is as much superior to both as the
mixture smoked in it is superior to
either of the others. -St. James Ga.
gette.
1 kA-0 T.
| What fruit is stream? The cur.
rant. Whyp Because it has to ba