Morning journal and courier., 1889-01-31
THE COUNTRY CIGAR.
Hts Virtue and It's VIrHlence Described by an Experienced Victim.
 TP K M ;p p,,oy

[R. K. M. in Puck1
 When the average man has smoked his
 first rural cigar he cannot help imagining, if he have any palate, that that cigar was grown
 in the country for country consumption.
 There are different kinds of country cigars,
 but each one represents 8 different kind of
 vileness. They come in boxes decorated with spread eagles and viyandieres and other com
 binations of ships, cannon balls, sunsets and half dressed goedesses, after the manner of the seals of the various States of the Union.
 The brands are equally inconsistent and misleading. Why cigar should be called ''The 2. 40" is mystery, unless it means that they are worth $40 thousand or that the man who smokes two of them never lives long. CT than 40 years.
 In country cigars there are the stsott moist"
 specimen and the 'thard dry" When you bite
 the end of the former you leave it like the edge of wedge, and when you light it it tastes like gall, loosens your teeth and makes your tongue feel as though asleep. The hard dry cigar you cannot squeeze like the soft one without having it crack like a wishbone. You bite on it and you think you are biting pretzel, it is so brittle. And when you bite the end off a long splinter usual ly comes out of the heart of the weed, and the outside wrapper suddenly unrolls like @ shaving and silently steals away. As soon as you draw on it, slivers of tabac- co get into your throat and nose, and when you light it it burns all the way down one side, while the other remains intact. Sometimes @ country cigar will lose its out side wrapper, and as you draw the smoke will pass through it about an inch iu front of | your mouth. This will not satisfy you if you | are fond of smoking, but it will greatly ben I eft your health, or rather husband it. It | makes little difference which end of one of | these cigars you light, it will smoke about the \ same. Many 8 countryman will carry one of | these cigars-spslled with an "s'-around in n.s vest pockes awaiting the arriva of Sunday. ! By that time the cigar is so dry that 1t has | warped, and in trying to straighten it it
 breaks, and he is obliged to fasten newspa- per wrapper about it with mucilage; and then he smokes it with great joy while reading the dry goods advertisements that enwrap it. | The man who's slave to this kind of weed Is slave indeed.
 The rural grocer hands out one of these | 'Intimidads" to every customer when he set-
 ties his bill; and it is believed that the reason
 most country people do not pay the grocer is | that they wish to escape the cigar, which should be chased with green groceries, such as cabbage and parsley.
 The country cigar is no doubt the thing that drives most long headed countrymen to the pipe, for the long headed countryman doesn't care for cigar that has no nicotine in ! it. He likes cowhide well enough on his feet,
 but he doesn't care for it it's flavor in cigar. The country cigar does not soothe one, or drive away dull care, or throw one into vision full of languishing landscape and Persian pomp, and the proper place for it is in the box, that \ it may not put the smoker into one. Oh while the weeds hold out to burn, The average man may get Diviner joy if he but turn
 To the deadly cigarette For while the countryman reduces the country cigar to ashes, the country cigar also ! reduces him to ashes.