Every-day observation bears out the statement that the cigarette is the chosen smoke of youths. Go where we will, in crowded streets or country lanes, boys of the tender age of from nine or ten years upwards are almost constantly met with, smoking paper cigarettes, who were they better advised would prefer toffy, as was the case a few years ago. Surely every one knows that children cannot go on smoking tobacco with impunity, without, in fact, doing themselves life-long injury. Since parents are too heedless of their children’s welfare to prevent them from pursuing a practice the inevitable results of which will, by-and-by, appear in stunted, weakly growth and the train of evil which follow on deranged nerve-tissue, it would seem to be no more than humane that the Legislature should step in and prohibit the sale of tobacco in any form to children under the age of say, sixteen. Already some of the states of North America have instituted penal enactments for the protection of children against the indulgence, which to them is pernicious. But what shall be said of the young man whose downy lip bears testimony to his approaching majority—the age when life is a romance and the future aglow with roseate dreams? He knows himself to be the hope and pride of his parents, that in him is centred all sorts of brilliant possibilities. Nothing could be more fitting, he thinks, than that he should proclaim to the world that he is now a man by airing the park with his first cigar. And who so heartless as to say him nay? He now becomes confidential with the tobacconist, and learns from him the names of the choicest brands, as the Vegueras, the kind specially prepared for the Prince of Wales, selected from the finest growths of the plant raised in the Veulto Abajo district of Cuba, as well as the outer signs of many another rich and rare leaf from the gardens of the Queen of the Antilles, or from the plantations of the Indian Archipelago. By-and-by his whole energies will be devoted to the service of his king and country, doing the world’s roughest work away out in the wilds of Africa, or administering justice, it may be, among lawless tribes in Imperial India; and many a time, when belated on a desolate track with nothing to cover him but a blanket borrowed from his trusty peon, he will draw from the recesses of a deep pocket or knapsack a homely briar-root with more real pleasure than he ever felt when smoking the choicest cigar on the Mall.