Smoking certainly does blunt a man's sense of cleanliness. It certainly is an unclean habit. Does the reader remember the fine scene in "Shirley," in which the lover soliloquizes in Shirley's own boudoir, just after that "stainless virgin" has gone out? She had gone away suddenly, it appears, and left disorder behind her; but every object bore upon it the legible inscription, _I belong to a lady!_ "Nothing sordid, nothing soiled," says Louis Moore. "Look at the pure kid of this little glove, at the fresh, unsullied satin of the bag." This is one of those happy touches of the great artist which convey more meaning than whole paint-pots of common coloring. What a pleasing sense it gives us of the sweet cleanness of the high-bred maiden! If smokers were to be judged by the places they have _left_,--by the smoking-car after a long day's use, by the dinner-table at which they have sat late, by the bachelor's quarters when the bachelor has gone down town,--they must be rated very low in the scale of civilization. We must admit, too, I think, that smoking dulls a man's sense of the rights of others. Horace Greeley is accustomed to sum up his opinion upon this branch of the subject by saying: "When a man begins to smoke, he immediately becomes a hog." He probably uses the word "hog" in two senses: namely, _hog_, an unclean creature; and _hog_, a creature devoid of a correct sense of what is due to other creatures. "Go into a public gathering," he has written, "where a speaker of delicate lungs, with an invincible repulsion to tobacco, is trying to discuss some important topic so that a thousand men can hear and understand him, yet whereinto ten or twenty smokers have introduced themselves, a long-nine projecting horizontally from beneath the nose of each, a fire at one end and a fool at the other, and mark how the puff, puffing gradually transforms the atmosphere (none too pure at best) into that of some foul and pestilential cavern, choking the utterance of the speaker, and distracting (by annoyance) the attention of the hearers, until the argument is arrested or its effect utterly destroyed." If these men, he adds, are not blackguards, who are blackguards? He mitigates the severity of this conclusion, however, by telling an anecdote: "Brethren," said Parson Strong, of Hartford, preaching a Connecticut election sermon, in high party times, some fifty years ago, "it has been charged that I have said every Democrat is a horse-thief; I never did. What I _did_ say was only that every horse-thief is a Democrat, and _that_ I can prove." Mr. Greeley challenges the universe to produce a genuine blackguard who is not a lover of the weed in some of its forms, and promises to reward the finder with the gift of two white blackbirds.