Cigar Smoke
by
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.