Highlanders.
The variety of taste in snuff is accounted for by the proverb, "So many men to so many noses." Highland gentlemen of every degree are mostly fond of Gillespie; while operatives from the Lowlands generally prefer plain Scotch. When two Highlanders meet, they usually exchange a pinch of snuff, mutually preeing the contents of their mulls, while their colleys, (dogs) after a fashion of their own, take a reciprocal sniff of each other. Cuba is the favorite of the gentlemen of the stock exchange; the tradesman's box usually contains rappee; high dried Irish is grateful to those who love to feel the taste of snuff in their throat. Sea-faring men seldom take snuff: a sailor with a snuff-box is as rarely to be met with as a sailor without a knife.
The history of the rise and progress of snuff-taking abounds in incidents and anecdotes, among the most curious of all that relate to the various modes of using the weed. Though once the most popular and fashionable manner of using tobacco it now falls far behind the other and more common and more popular forms of indulging in the herb. In France and Spain the introduction of tobacco ushered in this form of using it, and to inhale a few grains of the pungent dust was the delight of polished and favored courtiers who regardless of the forms royalty patronized and gave sanction to the custom. Thus its use in a short time became popular all over Europe and gave unlimited scope for the satirist and dramatist to ridicule the habit. In spite, however, of frown and ridicule this ancient custom though not now as popular or as fashionable, still claims many sincere votaries and doubtless will as long as the plant is cultivated or used in any form.[Back to Contents]
CHAPTER IX.
CIGARS.
"The poet may sing of the leaf of the rose,
And call it the purest and sweetest that blows;
But of all the leaves that ever were tried,
Give me the tobacco leaf rolled up and dried."
The smoking of cigars is now considered the best as it is the most fashionable mode of using the weed. The word cigar is from the Spanish cigarro, and signifies a cylindrical roll of tobacco leaves, made of short pieces or shreds of the leaves divested of the stem and wound about with a binder, and enveloped in a portion of the leaf known by the name of wrapper—acute at one end and truncated at the other. In the East Indies a sort of cigar called cheroot is also made with both ends truncated. The smoking of tobacco in the form of cigars is doubtless the most general as well as the most ancient mode of its use. When Columbus landed in Hispaniola, the sailors saw the natives smoking the leaves of a plant, "the perfume of which was fragrant and grateful." But while cigars are of very ancient origin in the West Indies, they were not generally known in Europe until the beginning of the Nineteenth Century. In fact, of all the various works on gastronomy and the pleasures of the table, written and published from 1800 to 1815, not one speaks of this now indispensable adjunct of a good dinner. Even Britlat-Savarin, in his Physiologie du Gout, entirely ignores tobacco and all its distractions and charms. Benzo gives the following account of the manufacture of a cigar in Hispaniola:—
"They take a leafe from the stalks of their great bastard corn (which we commonly called Turkie—wheat) together with one of these tobacco-leaves and fold them up together like a coffin of paper, such as grocers make to put spices in, or like a small organ-pipe. Then putting one end of the same coffin to the fire, and holding the other end in their mouths, they draw their breath to them. When the fire hath once taken at the pipe's end, they draw forth so much smoke that they have their mouth, nose, throat, and head full of it; and, as if they tooke a singular delight therein they never leave supping and drinking till they can sup no more, and thereby loose their breath and their feeling."