“I wish to Heaven you would be more careful, Courtenay,” cried the surgeon, in an angry tone, and stamping with the pain.
“I really beg your pardon,” replied Courtenay, “snuffing’s a vile habit,—I wish I could leave it off.”
“So do your messmates,” replied the surgeon: “I cannot imagine what pleasure there can be in a practice in itself so nasty, independent of the destruction of the olfactory powers.”
“It’s exactly for that reason that I take snuff; I am convinced that I am a gainer by the loss of the power of smell.”
“I consider it ungrateful, if not wicked, to say so,” replied the surgeon, gravely. “The senses were given to us as a source of enjoyment.”
“True, doctor,” answered Courtenay, mimicking the language of Macallan; “and if I were a savage in the woods, there could not be a sense more valuable, or affording so much gratification, as the one in question. I should rise with the sun, and inhale the fragrance of the shrubs and flowers, offered up in grateful incense to their Creator, and I should stretch myself under the branches of the forest tree, as evening closed, and enjoy the faint perfume with which they wooed the descending moisture after exhaustion from the solar heat. But in civilised society, where men and things are packed too closely together, the case is widely different: for one pleasant, you encounter twenty offensive smells; and of all the localities for villainous compounds, a ship is indubitably the worst. I therefore patronise ‘’baccy,’ which, I presume, was intended for our use, or it would not have been created.”
“But not for our abuse.”
“Ah! there’s the rock that we all split upon—and I, with others, must plead guilty. The greatest difficulty in this world is, to know when and where to stop. Even a philosopher like yourself cannot do it. You allow your hypothesis to whirl in your brain, until it forms a vortex which swallows up everything that comes within its influence. A modern philosopher, with his hypothesis, is like a man possessed with a devil in times of yore; and it is not to be cast out by any human means, that I know of.”
“As you please,” replied Macallan, laughing; “I only deprecated a bad habit.”
“An hypothesis is only a habit,—a habit of looking through a glass of one peculiar colour, which imparts its hue to all around it. We are but creatures of habit. Luxury is nothing more than contracting fresh habits, and having the means of administering to them—ergo, doctor, the more habits you have to gratify, the more luxuries you possess. You luxuriate in the contemplation of nature—Price in quoting, or trying to quote, Shakespeare—Billy Pitts in his dictionary—I in my snuff-box; and surely we may all continue to enjoy our harmless propensities, without interfering with each other: although I must say, that those still-born quotations of our messmate Price are most tryingly annoying.”