not a director of the United Cigar Stores ever read it.

The fine art of smoking used, in older days, to have an etiquette, a usage, and traditions of its which a more hurried and hygienic age has discarded. It was the height of courtesy to ask your friend to let you taste his pipe, and draw therefrom three or four mouthfuls of smoke. This afforded opportunity for a gracious exchange of compliments. "Will it please you to impart your whiff?" was the accepted phrase. And then, having savored his mixture, you would have said: "In truth, a very excellent leaf," offering your own with proper deprecations. This, and many other excellent things, we learn from Mr. Apperson's noble book "The Social History of Smoking," which should be prayer book and breviary to every smoker con amore.

But the pipe rises perhaps to its highest function as the solace and companion of lonely vigils. We all look back with tender affection on the joys of tobacco shared with a boon comrade on some walking trip, some high-hearted adventure, over the malt-stained counters of some remote alehouse. These are the memories that are bittersweet beyond the compass of halting words. Never again perhaps will we throw care over the hedge and stride with Mifflin down the Banbury Road,

filling the air with laughter and the fumes of Murray's Mellow. But even deeper is the tribute we pay to the sour old elbow of briar, the dented, blackened cutty that has been with us through a thousand soundless midnights and a hundred weary dawns when cocks were crowing in the bleak air and the pen faltered in the hand. Then is the pipe an angel and minister of grace. Clocks run down and pens grow rusty, but if your pouch be full your pipe will never fail you.

How great is the witching power of this sovereign rite! I cannot even read in a book of someone enjoying a pipe without my fingers itching to light up and puff with him. My mouth has been sore and baked a hundred times after an evening with Elia. The rogue simply can't help talking about tobacco, and I strike a match for every essay. God bless him and his dear "Orinooko!" Or Parson Adams in "Joseph Andrews"-he lights a pipe on every page!

I cannot light up in a wind. It is too precious a rite to be consummated in a draught. I hide behind a tree, a wall, a hedge, or bury my head in my coat. People see me in the street, vainly seeking shelter. It is a weakness, though not a shameful one. But set me in a tavern corner, and fill the pouch with "Quiet Moments" (do you know that English mixture?) and I am yours to the last ash.

I wonder after all what was the sweetest pipe I ever smoked? I have a tender spot in memory for a fill of Murray's Mellow that Mifflin and I had in the old smoking room of the Three Crowns Inn at Lichfield. We weren't really thirsty, but we drank cider there in honour of Dr. Johnson, sitting in his chair and beneath his bust. Then there were those pipes we used to smoke at twilight sitting on the steps of 17 Heriot Row, the old home of R. L. S. in Edinburgh, as we waited for Leerie to come by and light the lamps. Oh, pipes of youth, that can never come again!

When George Fox was a young man, sorely troubled by visions of the devil, a preacher told him to smoke tobacco and sing hymns.

Not such bad advice.

HAY FEBRIFUGE

UR village is remarkable.

It contains the greatest publisher in

the world, the most notable department store baron (and inventor of that new form of literary essay, the department store ad.), the most fragrant gas tanks in the Department of the East, the greatest number of cinders per eye of any arondissement served by the R railway, and the most bitterly afflicted hay fever sufferer on this sneezing sphere. Also the editor of the most widely circulated magazine in the world, and the author of one of the best selling books that ever was written.

Not bad for one village.

Your first thought is Northampton, Mass., but you are wrong. That is where Gerald Stanley Lee lives. For a stamped, addressed envelope I will give you the name of our village, and instructions for avoiding it. It is bounded on the north by goldenrod, on the south by ragweed, on the east by asthma and the pollen of anemophylous plants.

It is bounded on the west by a gray stone

facsimile of Windsor Castle, confirmed with butlers, buttresses, bastions, ramparts, repartees, feudal tenures, moats, drawbridges, posterns, pasterns, chevaux de frise, machicolated battlements, donjons, loopholes, machine-gun emplacements, caltrops, portcullises, glacis, and all the other travaux de fantaisie that make life worth living for retired manufacturers. The general effect is emetic in the extreme. Hard by the castle is a spurious and richly gabled stable in the general style of the château de Chantilly. One brief strip of lawn constitutes a gulf of five hundred years in architecture, and restrains Runnymede from Versailles.

Our village is famous for beautiful gardens. At five o'clock merchants and gens de lettres return home from office and tannery, remove the cinders, and commune with vervain and bergamot. The countryside is as lovely as Devonshire, equipped with sky, trees, rolling terrain, stewed terrapin, golf meads, nut sundaes, beagles, spare tires, and other props. But we are equally infamous for hideous houses, of the Chester A. Arthur era. Every prospect pleases, and man alone is vile.

There is a large, expensive school for flappers on a hill; and a drugstore or pharmacy where the flappers come to blow off steam. It would be worth ten thousand dollars to Beatrice Herford to ambush herself behind the Welch's grape juice