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Here were the frock-coated, soft-voiced, cigar-smoking gentlemen among whom Warburton and his directors had swung the colossal enterprise. What a vast difference between these men and the builders!
I have known too many instances of parents, led by such false evidence of constructive skill, apprenticing their sons to some engineering firm; and, after paying vast sums, finding out that the pretender comes out of the engineering shop with no other practical accomplishment than that of cigar-smoking!
That, after having impaired the organ, or weakened its tone, or dried up the salival menstruum, they should need a stimulant, even in the very form of the bane which injures them, is only of a piece with all that has been said of drinking, and especially of dram-drinking, with which latter debauch, the debauch of cigar-smoking has the closest possible alliance.
The emigre nobles would have gazed with unutterable horror at their degenerate descendants of the present day; but these young, booted, bearded, cigar-smoking scions of la jeune France would have run round their courteous, but, perhaps, rather slow ancestors, in all the details of daily life.
The unreflecting servility with which men adopt new and foreign practices, is fully exemplified in the present case; for it is notorious that the practice of cigar-smoking, the modern foppery from Regent-street to Cheapside and Cornhill, was an importation of the Peninsular War; the imitation having been begun by the Spaniards, whose models are what are usually called the savages of America.
For four days there were no rapids we could not run without unloading. Then, on the 19th, we got a canoe from Senhor Barboso. He was a most kind and hospitable man, who also gave us a duck and a chicken and some mandioc and six pounds of rice, and would take no payment; he lived in a roomy house with his dusky, cigar-smoking wife and his many children.
And thereafter no question was raised when Ah Chun elected to enter his brilliant drawing-room in blue silk robe, wadded slippers, and black silk skull-cap with red button peak, or when he chose to draw at his slender-stemmed silver-bowled pipe among the cigarette-and cigar-smoking officers and civilians on the broad verandas or in the smoking room. Ah Chun occupied a unique position in Honolulu.
Yonder, that raw-looking young gentleman, with the crumpled frock-coat, and loose cravat, and sea-sick visage, is asking every one "if they think he may land without a passport." You scarcely recognise him for the cigar-smoking dandy of yesterday, that talked as if he had lived half his life on the continent.
Liebig once asserted that cigar-smoking was prejudicial from the amount of gaseous carbon inhaled. We cannot believe this. The heat of cigar-smoke may have some influence on the teeth; and, on the whole, the long pipe, with a porous bowl, is probably the best way of using tobacco in a state of ignition. By repeated fermentations in preparing snuff, much of the nicotin is evaporated and lost.
"Henry Maudslay," he says, "lived in the days of snuff-taking, which unhappily, as I think, has given way to the cigar-smoking system. He enjoyed his occasional pinch very much. It generally preceded the giving out of a new notion or suggestion for an improvement or alteration of some job in hand.
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