A clergyman in one of our New England villages once preached a sermon, which one of his auditors commended.
"Yes," said a gentleman to whom it was mentioned, "it was a good sermon, but he stole it!"
This was told to the preacher. He resented it, at once, and called upon his parishioner to retract what he had said.
"I am not," replied the aggressor, "very apt to retract any thing I may have said, for I usually weigh my words before I speak them. But in this instance I will retract. I said you had stolen the sermon. I find, however, that I was wrong; for on returning home, and referring to the book whence I thought it had been taken, I found it there, word for word!"
The angry clergyman "left the presence," with an apparent consciousness that he had made very little by his "motion."
We gave in a late "Drawer" some rather frightful statistics concerning snuff-takers and tobacco-chewers: we have now "the honor to present" some curious characteristics of the kinds of materiel which have regaled the nostrils of so many persons who were "up to snuff."
Lundy Foot, the celebrated snuff-manufacturer, originally kept a small tobacconist's shop at Limerick, Ireland. One night his house, which was uninsured, was burnt to the ground. As he contemplated the smoking ruins on the following morning, in a state bordering on despair, some of the poor neighbors, groping among the embers for what they could find, stumbled upon several canisters of unconsumed but half-baked snuff, which they tried, and found so grateful to their noses, that they loaded their waistcoat pockets with the spoil.
Lundy Foot, roused from his stupor, at length imitated their example, and took a pinch of his own property, when he was instantly struck by the superior pungency and flavor it had acquired from the great heat to which it had been exposed. Treasuring up this valuable hint, he took another house in a place called "Black-Yard," and, preparing a large oven for the purpose, set diligently about the manufacture of that high-dried commodity, which soon became widely known as "Black-Yard Snuff;" a term subsequently corrupted into the more familiar word, "Blackguard."
Lundy Foot, making his customers pay liberally through the nose for one of the most "distinguished" kinds of snuffs in the world, soon raised the price of his production, took a larger house in the city of Dublin, and was often heard to say,