San Antonio daily light. [volume] (San Antonio, Tex.) 1886-1907, 1895-12-30
coLoRlNa A MsessoHAuM.
You May Thus Nurse Your DslicaSs Bowl
to a Beautiful Tint.

You May Thus Nurse Your psiIcaSs Bowl
to a Beautiful Tint
Few smokers of meerschaum pipes
are masters of the art of keeping
them clean and giving them that beau
| tiful color which makes the meer-
schaum the favorite of all pipe
smokers The word meerschaum is a
compound of two German words
meer, sea and schaum, foam. Nicer
schaum is a mineral clay found in
Turkey and Germany.
Pipe dealers will rarely tell about
the fine art of coloring and preserving
your meerschaum.
The most common complaint about a
meerschaum pipe is that it will not
color beautifully, even after months
of most careful attention. If genuine
meerschaum in pipe does not take on
a good color the fault Is with the
smoker. Ignorance is the general
cause of the nasty, muddy discolora-
tion of the fine clay. Another reason
why pipe turns out so badly is
that the owner overdoes his smoking
In his zeal to get it colored. He
smokes IL constantly. When one pipe
full of tobacco is smoked out he inn
mediately refills the bowl and goes on
putting. When warm from smoking he
lays 1t on the marble mantle to cool
off where it will be safe. 1t is with
him night and day, and he smokes it.
particularly if he be an an Englishman
in the cold street, the warm Office and
| the house.
In preparing the meershaum, after
| the artist has finished cutting the de-
sign and has shaped the bowl, the fin
| ished pipe is boiled in wax. Wax is
used for this purpose because 1t pene-
trates the pores and serves to keep the
coloring mattering in the pipe. The
coloring matter is the Oil of the tobac-
CO and not the oil of nicotine, as is err
roneously supposed. This oil, of
course, comes from the inside and not
from the outer surface of the pipe.
The oil of tobacco sinks into the meer-
schaum, which is of very fine, porous
clay. The oil is stopped by the wax
before it is driven out by the heat to
| the outer surface. If it were not for
the wax the coloring matter would
| pass out oozing to the surface and get
rubbed or drop off, and the pipe could
never be colored. No smoker should
try to hurry the coloring of a pipe,
for the wax will be driven out, and
the dry, raw clay will not color prop
erly.
The smoker should also remember
| that the nearer to the top of the bowl
the wax is kept and preserved, the finer
| and broader will be the coloring. The
pipe, therefore, should never be filed
to the top. If this fact were more gen.
orally known among smokers we would
not see so many meerschaum pipes
| with a dirty brown color at the top,
where the oil has been forced out by
the great heat of the tobacco.
In moking the smoker should take
long, slow puffs. He should have a
care not to handle the pipe with per-
| spring hands or fingers, as the sweat
is injurious to the clay, having acid
In 1t. This perspiration on the pipe
while heated will give the surface a
be eradicated, and the pipe will be
ruined for artistic purposes beyond re-
demption.
Never cover the pipe with coat of
channels leather. Chamois skin alb
serbs the wax, and when the coat is
taken from the pipe it is frequently
found to be covered with blotches.
Remember that the bowl of a meer-
schaum pipe should never be touched
by anything while hot or even while
it is warm.-N.. Y. World.