cigar-stubs

Updated: May 20, 2025

The Colonel presented a handful of half-burned cigar-stubs. "No choice. They're all twenty-five-centers, assorted from a Waldorf lot." "Thanks." Humphrey took three. The Colonel, reserving one for his own use, dropped the rest into his outer pocket. And now eleven men passed, smoking, eleven unapproachables, before one dropped a burning stump.

Ruth McEnery Stuart - Moriah's Mourning and Other Half-Hour Sketches

He had a curiously opposed nature, quoting with enthusiasm the idealistic philosophers, and descending into such abject materialism as haunting the bishop's palace for the cigar-stubs. He would say that the purest joy in life is that which lifts us out of our daily existence and transforms us into disinterested spectators of it.

Frederick O'Brien - Mystic Isles of the South Seas.