The daily morning journal and courier., 1906-01-09
TASTE FOR RANK CIGARS.
MEN WHO PREFER STOGIES TO
 THE BEST TOBACCO.

A JangIed Tobacco Palate One Result
 of Excessive smoIxing-Depew Quit
 oSave Himself From Rank Cgars--
 Men Always Going to Give up Tobac-
 co.
 The tobacconist nodded in the direc- tion of prosperous looking man who was just leaving the shop with box under his arm.
 There goes a tobacco pervert, or re- vert, rather" said he. He has reverted to stogies after smoking the best ci- gars going for twenty years and more. His taste in tobacco has undergone gradual degeneration, perhaps be- cause he has always smoked excessive ly. Now his tobacco palate has become 50 tangled that he wants something rand and acrid, and so he's become a stogie man.
 When he first began to deal with me he paid SIS a hundred for his smokes. After few years he began to complain to me that his eighteen dol lar cigars tasted mean to hin-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 on a fishing trip. The brand cost $S TI0 at the rate of about twenty a day. After a while he began to tell me that his eight dollar cigars tasted gum Wny 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 50 cents apiece and asked him to let me know how he liked it.
 He came back the next day and re- proved me for my facetiousness in in ducing him to smoke what he called a Putridoro. Then I knew that his to- bacco taste was gone, and that noth- ing but rank goods was ever going to satisfy him again.
 T tried him out on perfectly com mon and ornery brand of Wheeling stogie, and that stogle made an imme- dlate 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 stogie and fairly eats them.
 His is a square out-and-our case of degeneration in tobacco taste. His over- indulgence in tobacco for a long period of years has twisted his tobacco ap- petite, very much in the same manner that some gourmets and epicures be- come, in time, addicted to mouldy cheese and abnormally high game.
 His case is by no means unusual Many smokers succumb, in time, to what they term the superior joys of the rankest imaginable cigars.
 "One of my customers for many years is the head of a brokerage con cern who, ten years or so ago, used to pay $30 a hundred for about as fine a cigar as comes out of the Vuelta Ab- %a1o district, He, too, now smokes a stogie that smells like a fire in bone fertilizer factory,
 "A severe attack of illness, I have no- ticed will often pervert a mans taste < in tobacco. Typhoid fever seems to have this effect more than any other ailment. Several of my customers, after having got over attacks of typhoid fe- yer, have complained to me that their regular brand of cigars tasted and smelled abominable to them.
 These have fiddled around in such cases with different brands, generally milder ones, but, in time, they've des- cended to rank kinds of cigars where upon they've expressed their delight and told me that such cigars have brought back to them the old acute pleasure that they had taken in tobac- co before falling i'll.
 Senator Depew found his tobacco taste degenerating nearly twenty years ago. He had been a great smoker of ci- gars, consuming from fifteen to twenty of the best day from his early man. hood. Then he found that he wasn't getting any good out of his expensive dcg; rs. and he was puzzled to find-he himself told me so-that ne was begin ming to extract keen enjoyment from the aroma of what he knew to be rank cigars smoked by other fellows,
 "As an experiment he got box ot extremely rank cigars, and he discov- cred that he enjoyed them tremend- u.~ously. But he made up his mind that fie wasn't going to become an afflictior to his friends and associates, and so he decided that rather than yield to what he knew to be a degenerate appetite he would quit smoking altogether. And he did quit-suddenly, but for good and all
 'The fellows who are always mak- ing up their minds to give up smoking are an amusing lot, by the way. The very great majority of them are al- ways making up their minds to quit and that's all; they never get any further.
 "One of my customers, now a testy old chap, to whom I've been selling ci' gars for nearly quarter of a century has been swearing every time he came fin here for box of his brand during all that time it was positively to be his last box.
 When I smoke up this box I'll be through with the internal weed for ever he always declares, whacking his cane down on the counter. It's all blam' ed foolish, this smoking business, when you begin to analyze it, and I'm go'
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