University of Virginia Library

XX.
Dainty Hints for Epicurean Smokers.[1]

WHOEVER has been in Havana must needs recollect
the little brazier, with its ball of white
ashes, beneath which a live hard-wood coal, called a
“candela,” glows all day for the accommodation of
smokers in every house. This we thought once a dainty
device. But our friend, Master Karl, has given us some
new, delicate and fragrant suggestions:—

“It is an established canon that the purest and most
elevated tastes or flavors are unmixed—simple. I respectfully
submit that in smoking tobacco, this rule by
no means holds good.

And here I might cite the learned Winstruphius
who in his `Epigrammata,' puns so learnedly on Bacchus
and To-Bacco, and their mutual flavoring influence.
This I spare you. Likewise the lucubrations of Schiop
pius Dunderhedius, who in speaking most horrifically,
De odore fetida tobacci, distinctly analyzes it into two
smells—one infernal, the other diabolical. This spared
also, (by request).

“But I mean simply to say that a point may be given
to a good cigar by lighting it from wood—not from the
timber of a lucifer match, but from a smoldering, smoking
fragment of a log, either hickory, oak, or even pine.
And note ye, good fellows all, that the earlier in the
season this is done, the more delicate is the goût; yea,
this rule holds so far good, that on the first crisp evenings
in September, no musk-rose or violet that is—nay,
no vitivert—nay, no ess bouquet—nay, no florimel, nay,
no ean de cypre—nay, no hediosmya—nay, no daintily-ambered
aqua coloniœ or any Paradisaical sweets that
be, can surpass the odorat of the first whiff of a wood-lighted
cigar.

“Yea, and more. If you smoke light, and mild, and
dry, preferring Latikéa and Knaster to fine-cut, tumback
and chopped cavendish, there is a class of perfumes—
that I ween, which Piesse places as the third note in the
gamut of good smells—a certain spicy oriental class,
such as cascarrilla, or a faint admixture of santal, which
perfumes the axe which lays it low, which in no wise detracts
from piping joys. And I tell you in all truth,
that Virginia leaf, with these sweet delights, and with
sumach or kinni kinnick therein gently mingled, spreads
around such a pastilled, ecclesiastical cathedral air,
blended with dim souvenirs of the rue Bréda, that he
who smokes thereof is oftentimes in tone to sing the
high song of King Solomon, or the lyrics of the Persian
lànd, wherein love and devotion are so curiously entwined,

that no sensation that is, can be compared
thereto, unless it be the kissing of your sweetheart
during sermon-time under the lee of a high-backed old-fashioned
pew.