Cigar Smoke
Few persons can readily conceive of the amount of cigars consumed in
this country, daily, to say little or nothing of the yearly smokers. The
growing passion for the noxious weed is truly any thing but pleasantly
contemplative. A boy commences smoking at ten or a dozen years old, and
by the time he should be "of age," he is, in various hot-house developed
faculties, quite advanced in years! And street smoking, too, has
increased, at a rate, within a year past, that bids fair to make the
Puritan breezes of our evenings as redolent of "smoke and smell," as
meets one's nasal organic faculties upon paying a pop visit to New York.
There is but one idea of useful import that we can advance in favor of
smoking, to any great extent, in our city: consumption and asthmatic
disorders generally are more prevalent here than in other and more
southern climates, and for the protection of the lungs, cigar smoking,
to a moderate extent, may be useful, as well as pleasurable; but an
indiscriminate "looseness" in smoking is not only a dead waste of much
ready money, but injurious to the eyes, teeth, breath, taste, smell, and
all other senses.