The Baltimore County union. [volume] (Towsontown, Md.) 1865-1909, 1905-11-25
THE TASTE FOR RANK CIGARS.

THE TASTE FOR RANK CIGARS.
The tobacconist nodded in the di-
rection of a prosperous looking man
who was just leaving the shop with
box under his arm.
"There goes tobacco pervert, or
revert, rather" said he. "He has
reverted to stogies after smoking the
best cigars going for twenty years
and more"
"dis taste in tobacco has under
gone gradual degeneration, perhaps
because he has always smoked exces-
sively. Now his tobacco palate has
become so tangled that he wants
something rank and acid, and so he's
become stogie man.
"When he first began to deal with
me he paid $I8 a hundred for his
smokes. After few years he began
to complain to me that his eighteen
dollar cigars tasted mean to him
said they were too sweet and insipid
and that he had ceased to get any
fun out of 'em.
"He named brand that he had
smoked and liked while up the State
OIL fishing trip. That brand cost
$8 hundred. He began to smoke
them at the rate of about twenty day.
"After while he began to tell me
that his eight dollar cigars tasted
gummy and gluey and that he could
smell the wrapper paste in the smoke.
Just for the sake Of trying him out,
gave him one day cigar that I sell
for so cents apiece and asked him to
let me know how he liked it.
"He came back the next day and
reproved me for my facetiousness in
inducing him to smoke what he called
a Putridoro. Then 1 knew that his
tobacco taste was gone, and that moth
ing but the rank goods was ever going
to satisfy him again.
"I tried him out on a perfectly
common and ordinary brand of Wheel
ing stogie, and that stogie made an
immediate hit with him. Said it was
the toothsomest piece of tobacco he'd
had in his face for years, and from
then on he's been ordering his stogies
from me by the thousand. He loves
the rancid taste and smell of the sto-
gies and fairly eats them.
"His is square, out-and-out case
of degeneration in tobacco taste. His
over-indulgence in tobacco for long
period of years has twisted his tobacco
appetite, very much in the same man
ner that some gourmets and epicures
become, in time, addicted to mouldy
cheeses and abnormally high game.
"His case is by no means unusual.
Many smokers succumb, in time, tc
what they term the superior joys o.
the rankest imaginable cigars.
Zone of my customers for many
years is the head of a brokerage con
Germ who, ten years or so ago, used tc
pay $50 hundred for about as fine
cigar as comes out of the Vuelts
Abajo district. He, too, now smoke:
a stogie that smells like fire in &
bone fertilizer factory.
"a severe attack of illness, have
noticed, will often pervert man:
taste in tobacco. Typhoid fever
seems to have this effect more thar
any other ailment. Several of my
customers, after having got over at
tacks of typhoid fever, have com
planned to me that their regular brant
| of cigars tasted and smelled abomina
BILE to them.
"These have 6ddled around in sucf
cases with different brands, generally
milder ones, but, in time, they We al
descended to rare kinds of cigars
whereupon they've expressed thei
delight and told me that such cigar
have brought back to them the ole
acute pleasure that they had taken il
tobacco before falling i'll.
"Senator Depew found his tobacct
taste degenerating nearly twent,
years ago. He had been a grea
smoker of cigars, consuming from
fifteen to twenty of the best a da,
from his early manhood. Then b
found that he wasn't getting any goot
out of his expensive cigars, and b
was puzzled to fnd-he himself toll
me so-that he was beginning to ex
tract keen enjoyment from the arom
of what he knew to be rank cigar
smoked by other fellows.
Gas an experiment he got box G
extremely rank cigars, and he discov
cred that he enjoyed them tremen
dously. But he made up his mine
that he wasn't going to become al
af1iction to his friends and associates
and so he decided that rather thai
Weld to what he knew to be degen
crate appetite he would quit smokinl
altogether. And he did quit-sud
denly, but for good and all.
"The fellows who are always max
ing up their minds to give up smokin
are an amusing lot, by the way. Th
very great majority of them are alway
making up their minds to quit, an
that IS all they never get any further
Zone of my customers, now test
!, old chap, to whom I've been sellin
cigars for nearly quarter of a Ger
tury, has been swearing every tim
he came in here for box of his bran
during all that-time that it was pos
lively to be his last box.