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There, you may twist your person into any shape you please, without the fear of discomposing a silken dress, or a nursemaid's petticoats. No boisterous arguments from snuff-taking sexagenarians: all is placid Eden-like just as a dozer's sanctorum ought to be! The only thing attendant on the doze of an inside passenger, is the great chance of being suddenly aroused by the entrance of company.
Henderson and other travellers have ascribed to them. They are intolerably addicted to brandy-drinking, indeed, their circumstances would greatly improve if they drank less and worked more. They are scarcely less passionately addicted to snuff-taking, as well as to tobacco-chewing. Their mode of taking snuff is peculiar, and certainly not one to be imitated.
The session of the Free Kirk came in a body a little later, and to them my father pledged himself for the evening sermon. The senior elder of the Established Kirk, a snuff-taking man and very deliberate, was the last to appear, and to his request for an afternoon sermon there was nothing left to offer but the services of the young probationer in theology.
I might indeed have exampled his snuff-taking as a proof of his power of endowing everything with a sense of adventure and pregnant interest. His step was light and very quick, his voice pleasant and refined, and his manner of talking, as may be imagined, what I must in spite of the associations call arresting.
"I want to get a situation, uncle, so that I may earn some money," said Tom, who never fell into circumlocution. "A situation?" said Mr. Deane, and then took his pinch of snuff with elaborate justice to each nostril. Tom thought snuff-taking a most provoking habit. "Why, let me see, how old are you?" said Mr. Deane, as he threw himself backward again.
"Eh bien! How you do, Mistare Sonee? Is eet dat you weel have a peench of snuff?" For the Frenchman had quite forgotten Dave's mishap in snuff-taking, and offered the snuff out of habitual complaisance. "No, musheer," said Dave, "I can't use no snuff of late yeers. 'Fection of the nose; makes me sneeze dreffle." "Oh! Eh blen! C'est comme il faut. I mean dat is all right, vare good, mistare.
Treated on such occasions as at best a pair of dangling and merely nominal court-functionaries, picturesque hereditary triflers entitled to the petites entrees but quite external to the State, which began and ended with the Nursery, they could only retire, in quickened sociability, to what was left them of the Palace, there to digest their gilded insignificance and cultivate, in regard to the true Executive, such snuff-taking ironies as might belong to rococo chamberlains moving among china lap-dogs.
The poem is still well worth reading; for as an expression of the artificial life of the age of its cards, parties, toilettes, lapdogs, tea-drinking, snuff-taking, and idle vanities it is as perfect in its way as Tamburlaine, which reflects the boundless ambition of the Elizabethans.
In the small kitchen, on the walls of which, and even on the dresser, Taffy's books fought for room with Humility's plates and tin-ware, the Chief Engineer proved to be a most courteous old gentleman. Towards Humility he bore himself with an antique politeness which flattered her considerably. And when he praised her tea she almost forgave him for his detestable habit of snuff-taking.
She took snuff, and each time that she did so she employed all the pretty precautions of the fashionable women of her early days; the details of this snuff-taking constituted a ceremony which could be explained by one fact she had very pretty hands.
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