By this time the compartment was so densely filled with smoke that I opened the window and put out my head for breath, as a signal of distress, in the hope, but vain, of enlisting the sympathies of the smokers, and inducing them to forego their pleasures while I recovered. I detected grim smiles of satisfaction on the dark faces of my fellow-travellers, who puffed away the more vigorously, as they looked on my woe-begone face. Perhaps by advertising a reward for the discovery, it might be possible to find a man in Spain who does not smoke. Yet, strange to say, the culture of tobacco in Spain is forbidden by law. The soil and climate are favorable, and its cultivation has been a great success. But by that kind of legislation or decree peculiar to Spain, and constantly reminding one of the Chinese, the mother country, Spain, is prohibited from raising tobacco in order that the daughter, Cuba, may have the monopoly. The right of importation is sold to contractors, who make a great business of it. In the middle of the fifteenth century the Spaniards began to get tobacco from America, and they have been getting more and more of it ever since. In 1860 they smoked seven millions of cigars, and cigars are not the thing they usually smoke. They have their tobacco rolled up in little bits of paper, and these they carry in their pockets, with matches. Often they carry the tobacco and the paper separately, and make a cigarette when they want it, making one while smoking another. These interesting manufactures are not peculiar to Spain; they are common in our own country, but not so general. The weed is used only for smoking and snuffing in Spain. I cannot learn that it is _chewed_ at all. Children smoke at an earlier age in Spain than in other countries. It is not uncommon for them to begin at six, or even five years of age. And they never leave it off till they die. Ladies smoke. Not often do we see them with a cigarette in their pretty mouths on the street or in the cars, but in the café and in the drawing-room they enjoy it, as well as in the boudoir and the bath. By cool fountains, in a marble-paved patio, among the orange-trees, or lolling at noon on their silken-hung couches, they love to smoke, and their lords have spoiled their own breaths and taste too effectually to make any objection. Where both eat garlic it amounts to the same thing.