The daily morning journal and courier., 1906-01-09

and, of course, I've got to smoke along with them
 "The fellows at his house. was only one of his thousand and one excuses. "Of the men who really do make the stab at quitting I should say that about one in ten really sticks it out. The nine others backslide sooner or lat ter.
 "'When I quit one of them said to 1 to me not long ago. I bully and hector and abuse my wife and children, and impose upon my employees, and go up and downtown every day WNh a chip on my shoulder waiting for somebody I to step on my toes sos can take try at knocking his block off, and am a nuisance in general to myself and to everybody else. Gimme two boxes of my old brand and gimme 'em quick T have actually had the wives of several of my periodically quitting cus- toners drop in upon me here for the purpose of asking me to try to jolly their husbands into beginning to smoke again. They've told me that their men folks were unenduEable around their | homes without their smokes, and that there was no living with the tobacco i less ones.
 i've got one good customer, man who smokes both cigars and pipes, who has got a costly little way of quitting every six moths or so. He gets bit of an attack of what is known as liver, when his tobacco doesn't taste right to him, and then, attributing it all to his smoking, he promptly proceeds to chuck all of his cigars and smoking tobacco and pipes into the garbage can.
 "Now, that's pretty costly work for him, for he pays S22 a hundred for his cigars, and he always them in 800 lots Moreover, he always has seven fine p,pes, none of the mco5ting less than S1O in his rack. one of thsm for every day in the week-as All pipe smokers ought to have. by the way.
 Well, when the one smoke goes wrong, into the can the whole tobacco layout goes, and my good man bawls at his wife that he's through with the blasted imbecile habit of smoking for all time, in this life and the life to come. I've known him to last all of three days during the past fifteen years or so. Ut these tremendous quit ing stunts of his.
 During his quits he drops in upon me with heavy scowls and browbeats me for selling tobacco, which he calls fendish business that ought e be ex- tirpated by the police. Then when the hankering for tobacco has got him re- duced to a state of dish-rag wiltedness, he sort O crawls in upon me in a very humble kind of way and tries to tell me that he's had a heart-to-heart talk with his medical man, and that the physician has sternly forbidden him to give up smoking under any circum- stances, and then he orders q complete tobacco layout, including his usual big stock of cigars, and another set of pipes and smoking tobaco.
 "He watches me carefully out of the corner of his eye to see if I'm laugh ing at him, and at such times it would be as much as his custom is worth for me to crack even a semblance of a grin,
 Some men with the tobacco quitting hunch try to quit by tapsring off, but | that scheme isn't of much account. The man on a deduced tobacco allowance is just about as miserable as the fellow who's chucked smoking altogether, and the chap who finds that tobacco is real ly injuring him ought to adopt the only genuine way, and that is to quit abso- lutely, without any tapering off or tid- ding around.
 1 As matter of straight fact, how ,ever lot of fellows get these tobacco quitting lunches who are not being damaged by the tobacco habit at all. Their ills proceed from other causes, such as overeating and bolting their food, especially their luncheons. and ! overdrinking, too and when they begin to lose their edge from these or any other causes they promptly attribute all of their mean feeling to tobacco and work themselves into a hectic flush over the righteousness of the weed