I once saw a father teaching his little three-year-old boy to smoke. I knew a boy at Ellsworth who learned to smoke before he could light his pipe. His father, who taught him the wicked habit, was not at all respectable, and had often been jailed for selling rum.
The following is a sample of the modern John Hay’s style of teaching:—
LITTLE-BREECHES.
“I come into town with some turnips,
And my little Gabe come along—
No four-year-old in the county
Could beat him for pretty and strong;
Peart, and chipper, and sassy,
Always ready to swear and fight,
And I’d larnt him to chaw terbacker,
Jest to keep his milk teeth white.
“The snow come down like a blanket
As I passed by Taggart’s store;
I went in for a jug of molasses,
And left the team at the door.
They scared at something and started—
I heard one little squall,
And hell-to-split over the prairie
Went team, Little-Breeches and all.
“Hell-to-split over the prairie!
I was almost froze with skeer;
But we rousted up some torches,
And sarched for ’em far and near.
At last we struck hosses and wagon,
Snowed under a soft white mound:
Upsot, dead beat—but of little Gabe
No hide nor hair was found.
“And here all hopes soured on me
Of my fellow-critters’ aid—
I jest flopped down on my marrow bones,
Crotch-deep in the snow, and prayed.
By this the torches was played out,
And me and Isrul Parr
Went off for some wood to a sheep-fold,
That he said was somewhar thar.
“We found it at last, and a little shed
Where they shut up the lambs at night;
We looked in, and seen them huddled thar,
So warm, and sleepy, and white.
“And thar sot Little-Breeches, and chirped
As peart as ever you see:
‘I want a chaw of terbacker,
And that’s what’s the matter of me.’”
“I WANT A CHAW OF TERBACKER.”
Whipping School Boys and Girls to make them smoke.
In London, in 1721, Thomas Hearne tells us school children were compelled to smoke. “And I remember,” he says, “that I heard Tom Rogers say that when he was yeoman beadle that year, when the plague raged, being a boy at Eaton, all the boys of his school were obliged to smoke in the school-room every morning, and that he never was whipped so much in his life as he was one morning for not smoking.”
YOUNG SMOKERS.