IRON PIPE MADE AS A KEY.
The pipe is the popular smoking appliance and most smokers give it the preference over everything else that can be smoked. It also has the support of the ladies, and any careful housewife will tell us that she would rather admit three or four pipe smokers to her curtained and carpeted rooms than one of those horrid cigars, which leaves its faint and disagreeable odour hanging about the place for many days. Ladies, indeed, are more tolerant of tobacco smoke than they used to be.
The first kind of European pipes were walnut shells, a hole being bored in one side for the reception of the stem—a common straw. It is possible that we get from this early form of tobacco pipe the term "straw," as applied to modern long clays, if, indeed, they are not named like straw-berries, from the material which protects them from injury.
CARVED WOOD PIPE, 6½ INCHES HIGH. TOBACCO PLACED BEHIND HORSE'S HEAD.
The custom of using a pipe common to an assembled company was, no doubt, partly due to the circumstance that tobacco was at one time a most costly thing. Three years after its introduction here it cost per ounce what would be equivalent to 18s. of our present money. Later on it became the custom for a purchaser to throw into the scale a silver coin, and he received just as much tobacco in return as would balance his money.
For the same reason the bowls of early pipes were very small, witness our photographs of early English pipes dug up at Chelsea which could be filled many dozen times over with a single ounce of tobacco. But, as in all other things, demand stimulated supply, until tobacco in our own day has become remarkably cheap. Perhaps some of our readers who pay fourpence an ounce for their little luxury may traverse this statement, forgetting that the value of the weed which they purchase is only about one fourth of what they pay for it, the difference going to H.M. Customs.
After the walnut and straw pipes had had their day, clay pipes became common in this country, where smoking became general after the great plague of London in 1665. To this pestilence we owe the suddenly increased use of tobacco, for it was bruited abroad that of all the tradesmen of London the tobacconists alone had not been attacked by the disease.
Smoking was recognised as a valuable sanitary precaution against the malady, and we find quaint old Pepys mentioning the fact in his famous diary after seeing two houses in Drury Lane marked with a red cross on their portals—the token of a plague-stricken household. "It put me," he says, "in an illconception of myself and my smell, so that I was forced to buy some roll tobacco to smell to, and chaw, which took away my apprehension."