Does it pay to smoke? / by an old smoker.

  • James Parton
Date:
[1872?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Does it pay to smoke? / by an old smoker. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    is the use he makes of his surplus money. He spent the whole of it upon an edition of the works of Edmund Burke, and carried the volumes to his room, a happy youth. It was not the best choice, in literature, perhaps; but it was one that marked the civilized being, and indicated the future in¬ structor of his species. Suppose he had invested the sum (and we all know students Who would make just that use of an unexpected ten-dollar bill) in a new meerschaum and a bag of Lone-Jack tobacco! At the end of his college course he would have had, probably, a finely coloured pipe, —-perhaps the prettiest pipe of his year; but he would not have had that little “library of fifty volumes,” the solace of his coming years of poverty and fever and ague, always doing their part toward expanding him from a sectarian into a man of the world, and lifting him from the slavery of a mean country parish toward the mastership of a metro¬ politan congregation. His was the very nature to have been quenched by tobacco. If he had bought a pipe that day, instead of books, he might be at this moment a petty D.H., preaching safe inanity or silly eccentricity in some obscure corner of the world, and going to Europe every five years for his health!
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