Year: 1868

few women who have morbid love of
the odor of tobacco, who crave its slim
ulating aid as men do; and therefore
her Rochester has fragrance of the
weed about him at all times, with which
many readers have been captivated.
"Jane Eyre" is the book of recent years
which has been most frequently imitat-
ed, and consequently the circulating il
bralies are populous with smoking he
roes. Byron, Thackeray, and many
other popular authors have written
passages in which the smoke of tobacco
insnuatcs itself most agreeably into the
readers gentle senses.


Many smokers, too, have bee n made
such by the unexplained rigor with
which the practice Is sometimes forbid
den. Forbidden it must be in all
schools but merely forbidding it and
making it dire offence will not suffice
in these times. Some of the most pit
liable slaves ofsmoke have ever known
were brought in families and schools
where smoking was invested with the
irresistible charm of being the worst
thing boy could do, except running
away. Deep in the heart of the woods,
high up in rocky hills, far from the
haunts of men and schoolmasters mot
to speak of places less Nsalubrious), boys
assemble on holiday afternoons to sick
en- themselves with furtive smoke,
returning at the close of the day to re-
late the dazzling exploit to their COM
panions. In this way the habit some
times becomes SO tyrannical, that, if
the victims of it should give a sincere
definition of vacation" it would be
this, "The time when boys can get a
chance to smoke every day" can al
so state, that the only school / ever
knew or heard of in which young men
who had formed the habit were induced
to break themselves of it was the only
school ever knew or heard of in which
all students above the age of sixteen
were allowed to smoke. Still, it must
be forbidden. Professor Charlier, of
New York, will not have in his school
a boy who smokes even at home in his
fathers presence, or in the street; and
he is right but it requires all his tai
entS as disci plinarian and all his in
fuence as member ofsociety to enforce
the rule. Nor would even his vigilance
avail if he confined himself to the cold
enunciation of the law: Thou shalt not
smoke.


To forbid young men to smoke, with
out making an honest aud earnest and
skilItul attempt to convince their un-
derstandings that the practice is per-
nicious, is sometimes followed by de-
plorable consequences. At the Naval
Academy at Annapolis, not only is
smoking forbidden, but the prohibition
is effectual There are four hundred
yonng men confined within walls, and
subjected to such discipline that it is
impossible for rule to be broken, the
breaking of which betrays itself. The
result is, that nearly all the students
chew tobacco, many of them to very
great excess, and to their most serious
and wanifestinjury, That great nation
al institution teens with abuses, but,
perhaps, all the other deleterious inhu-
ences of the place united do less harm
than this one abomination.


On looking over the articles upon to-
bacco in the Enclycopedias, we occa-
sionally find writer's declaring or con-
iecturing that, as smoking has became
habit almost universal, there must be,
in the nature of things, a reason which
accounts for and justifies it. Accounts
for it, yes; justifes it, no.


So long as man lives the life of a
pure savage, he has good health with
out ever bestowing a thought upon the
matter, Nature, like good farmer,
saves the best for seed. The mightiest
bull becomes the father of the herd;
the great warrior, the great hunter, has
the most wives and children. The
sickly children are destroyed by the
hardships of savage life, and those who
survive are compelled to put forth such
exertions in procuring food and defend
ing their wigwams that they are always
''in training" The pure savage has
neither the skill nor the time to extract
from the wilds in which he lives the
poisons that could deprave his taste
and impair his vigor Your Indian
sleeps, with scanty covering, in wig
wan that freely admits the air. In his
own way, he is an exquisite cook. Nei.
ther Delmonico nor Parker nor Profes-
sor Blot ever cooked salmon or a
partridge as we'll as Rocky Mountain
Indian cooks them; and when he has
cooked bis fish or his bird, he eats with
it some perfectly simple preparation of
Indian corn. He is an absolutely w-
stimulated animal. The natural work.
ing of bis internal machinery generates
ali the vital force he wants. He is as
healthy as a buffalo, as a prize-fghter,
as the stroke-oar of a university boat.


But in our civilized, sedentary life, he
who would have good health must fight
forit. Many people have the insolence
to become parents who have no right
to aspire to that dignity; children are
born who have no right to exist; and
skill preserves many whom nature is
eager to destroy. Civilized man, too,
has learned the trick ofheading off some
of the diseases which used to sweep