“How came to start smoking?” said Mitchell. “Let’s see.” He reflected. “I started smoking first when I was about fourteen or fifteen. I smoked some sort of weed—I forget the name of it—but it wasn’t tobacco; and then I smoked cigarettes—not the ones we get now, for those cost a penny each. Then I reckoned that, if I could smoke those, I could smoke a pipe.”
He reflected.
“We lived in Sydney then—Surry Hills. Those were different times; the place was nearly all sand. The old folks were alive then, and we were all at home, except Tom.”
He reflected.
“Ah, well!... Well, one evening I was playing marbles out in front of our house when a chap we knew gave me his pipe to mind while he went into a church-meeting. The little church was opposite—a ‘chapel’ they called it.”
He reflected.
“The pipe was alight. It was a clay pipe and niggerhead tobacco. Mother was at work out in the kitchen at the back, washing up the tea-things, and, when I went in, she said: ‘You’ve been smoking!’
“Well, I couldn’t deny it—I was too sick to do so, or care much, anyway.
“‘Give me that pipe!’ she said.
“I said I hadn’t got it.