It is a prevalent idea in England that Americans smoke prodigiously, even as compared with "the average Britisher." Now, in America there is very little smoking. You may perhaps think I am wrong. A great many Americans, I allow, buy cigars in the most reckless fashion. But (apart from the fact that cigars are not necessarily tobacco) I find that as a rule they throw away more than they smoke. Speaking roughly, then, I should say so-called "smokers" in this country might be divided into three classes: those who buy cigars because they cost money; those who buy them because cigars give them a decent excuse for spitting; and those who buy them under the delusion that the friend who is with them smokes, and that hospitality or courtesy requires that they should humour his infatuation. Of the trifling residue, the men who smoke because, as they put it, "they like it," it is not worth while to speak. Now, one of the results of this general aversion to tobacco is that when a foreigner addicted to the weed comes over and tries to smoke, he is hunted about so, that (as I have often done myself) he longs to be in his coffin, if only to get a quiet corner for a pipe. In hotels they hunt you down, floor by floor, till they get you on to a level with the street, and then from room to room till they get you out on to the pavement. There is nowhere where you can read and smoke--or write and smoke--or have a quiet chat with a friend over a pipe--or in fact smoke at all, in the respectable, civilized, Christian sense of the word. Of course, if you like, you can "smoke" in the public hall of the hotel. But I would just as soon sit out on the kerbstone at the corner of the street as among a crowd of men holding cigars in their mouths and shouting business. Out on the kerbstone I should at any rate find the saving grace of passing female society. In private houses again, smokers are consigned to the knuckle end of the domicile and the waste corners thereof, as if they snatched a fearful joy from some secret fetish rites, or had to go apart into privacy to indulge in a little surreptitious cannibalism. In the streets, friends do not like you to smoke when with them, and there are very few public conveyances in which tobacco is comfortably possible.