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Hockins dreamed of tobacco-pipes and explosions; Mark dreamed of freed slaves, thunder-struck queens, eloping lovers and terrible consequences; and Ebony dreamed of incomprehensible situations, crashing thunderbolts, and unimaginable coruscations of resplendent fire!
Whiskers were never worn, and moustaches and beards only after forty, before which age the hair grew, if at all, very scantily. Full, thick beards, as in the West, were practically never seen, even on the aged. Snuff-bottles, tobacco-pipes, and fans were carried by both sexes. Nails were worn long by members of the literary and leisured classes.
My front-window looked out upon a long, straggling, ill-paved street, with its due proportion of mud-heaps, and duck pools; the houses on either side were, for the most part, dingy-looking edifices, with half-doors, and such pretension to being shops as a quart of meal, or salt, displayed in the window, confers; or sometimes two tobacco-pipes, placed "saltier-wise," would appear the only vendible article in the establishment.
Next appeared a cluster of tobacco-pipes, consisting of Sir Walter Raleigh's, the earliest on record, Dr. Parr's, Charles Lamb's, and the first calumet of peace which was ever smoked between a European and an Indian. Among other musical instruments, I noticed the lyre of Orpheus and those of Homer and Sappho, Dr.
Tresham's boy, had it that morning from his cousin, Jim Redmond, whose aunt lived at Ringsend, and kept the little shop over against the 'Plume of Feathers, where you might have your pick and choice of all sorts of nice and useful things bacon, brass snuff-boxes, penny ballads, eggs, candles, cheese, tobacco-pipes, pinchbeck buckles for knee and instep, soap, sausages, and who knows what beside.
All have iron stoves for winter use; no carpets cover the floors, and no ornaments grace the walls, save one or two prints, and a number of large tobacco-pipes, for the Norsemen are great smokers and chewers of tobacco. The language here perplexed our artist not a little.
Alas! there the nasty, sorry, useless stuff lay: I had no manner of business for it; and I often thought within myself, that I would have given a handful of it for a gross of tobacco-pipes, or for a hand-mill to grind my corn; nay, I would have given it all for sixpenny-worth of turnip and carrot seed from England, or for a handful of peas and beans, and a bottle of ink.
Carved and gilded tables bore a whole armoury of weapons. You shot at tobacco-pipes, twisting and stationary, at balls poised on jets of water, and at proper targets. In the corners of the saloon, near the open, were large crimson plush lounges, on which you lounged after the fatigue of shooting. A pink-clad girl, young and radiant, had the concern in charge.
I thought it strange so many saints and martyrs should have gone by there so recently, and left not so much as a leaf out of their Bibles, or a name carved upon the wall, while the rough soldier-lads that mounted guard upon the battlements had filled the neighbourhood with their mementoes broken tobacco-pipes for the most part, and that in a surprising plenty, but also metal buttons from their coats.
Projectors and monopolists who had obtained patents for licensing all the inns and alehouses for being the sole vendors of manufactured articles, such as gold lace, tobacco-pipes, starch, soap, &c., were grinding and cheating the people to an extent which was not at first understood, although the practice had existed in the former reign.
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