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Updated: June 19, 2025
Solitude and disconsolate loneliness from morning till night such are the days that follow each other and make up life. To cure my sick brain the doctor has prevailed upon me to give up taking snuff altogether; for the last six days I have not taken a single pinch, which only he can appreciate who is himself as passionate a snuff-taker as I was.
There is certainly something of exquisite kindness and thoughtful benevolence in that rarest of gifts, fine breeding; and when now, re-manned and resolute, I turned round and saw Sir Sedley's soft blue eye shyly, but benignantly, turned to me, while, with a grace no other snuff-taker ever had since the days of Pope, he gently proceeded to refresh himself by a pinch of the celebrated Beaudesert mixture, I felt my heart as gratefully moved towards him as if he had conferred on me some colossal obligation.
Bucket looks at him as if his face were a vista of some miles in length and he were leisurely contemplating the same. "Do you happen to carry a box?" says Mr. Bucket. Unfortunately Mercury is no snuff-taker. "Could you fetch me a pinch from anywheres?" says Mr. Bucket. "Thankee. It don't matter what it is; I'm not particular as to the kind. Thankee!"
However, I determined to see what could be done, so I took my ballads under my arm, and went to various publishers; some took snuff, others did not, but none took my ballads or Ab Gwilym, they would not even look at them. One asked me if I had anything else he was a snuff-taker I said yes; and going home, returned with my translation of the German novel, to which I have before alluded.
A snuff-taker is rarely to be met with, and few, if any, chew the weed, if we except the stevedores and foreign sailors to be seen about the shore and shipping. Havana has no wharves, properly speaking; vessels are loaded and discharged by means of lighters or scows.
Twenty years after, by the greatest chance in the world, I saw Glorious John, and sure enough Glorious John published my books, but they were different books from the first; I never offered my ballads or Ab Gwilym to Glorious John. Glorious John was no snuff-taker. He asked me to dinner, and treated me with superb Rhenish wine.
Father Roman, dried-up, small, alert, wrinkled, with big round eyes, a sharp chin, and a great snuff-taker, was an old campaigner, too; he had shriven many simple souls on the battlefields of the Republic, kneeling by the dying on hillsides, in the long grass, in the gloom of the forests, to hear the last confession with the smell of gunpowder smoke in his nostrils, the rattle of muskets, the hum and spatter of bullets in his ears.
It is true that the place where he had been was covered with it; but his handkerchiefs, irreproachable witnesses in such matters, were scarcely stained, and although they were white and of very fine linen, certainly bore no marks of a snuff-taker. Sometimes he simply passed his open snuff-box under his nose in order to breathe the odor of the tobacco it contained.
Early the next morning, Amedee, provided with a little basket, in which the old snuff-taker had put a little bottle of red wine, and some sliced veal, and jam tarts, presented himself at the boarding-school, to be prepared without delay for the teaching of the 'alma parens'.
He therefore determined to "be up to him," as the fancy have it; and having somewhere found the copy of an obsolete satirical epic which an enamored snuff-taker had once addressed to a mistress, who could reciprocate the interjection over her snuff box, "Knows he the joys that my nose knows!" Wheelwright copied it out, and presented it to the faculty as his own composition.
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