Legislature, with the black bowl gleaming between their teeth. One of the metropolitan representatives was seriously ill just before I left, from having smoked forty pipes of Latakia at one sitting. A cutty bowl, like a Creole’s eye, is most prized when blackest. Some smokers wrap the bowls reverently in leather during the process of colouring; others buy them ready stained, and get (I suppose) the reputation of accomplished whiffers at once. Every young swell glories in his cabinet of dirty clay pipes. A friend of mine used to call a box of the little black things his ‘_Stowe_ collection.’ Tobacco, I should add here, is seldom sold in a cut form; each man carries a cake about with him, like a card-case; each boy has his stick of Cavendish, like so much candy. The cigars usually smoked are Manillas, which are as cheap and good as can be met with in any part of the world. Lola Montez, during her Australian tour, spoke well of them. What stronger puff could they have than hers?” CHAPTER VI. SNIFFING AND SNEESHIN. “‘Tis most excellent,’ said the monk. ‘Then do me the favour,’ I replied, ‘to accept of the box and all; and when you take a pinch out of it, sometimes recollect that it was the peace-offering of a man who once used you unkindly, but not from the heart.’” STERNE’S _Sentimental Journey_. Everybody, of course, knows all about the Franciscan and his snuff-box, with which this chapter begins. Sterne narrates it in his happiest vein, and all who read it are somehow sure to remember it. Boxes are exchanged; the traveller is left to himself. Now he moralises: “I guard this box as I would the instrumental parts of my religion, to help my mind on to something better. In truth, I seldom go abroad without it; and oft and many a time have I called up by it the courteous spirit of its owner to regulate my own in the justlings of the world. They had found full employment for his, as I learned from his story, till about the forty-fifth year of his age, when, upon some military services ill-requited, and meeting at the same time with a disappointment in the tenderest of passions, he abandoned the sword and the sex together, and took sanctuary, not so much in his convent as in himself.” The word “snuff” is stated by competent authorities, to be an inflection of the old northern verb _sniff_, which latter word was in existence long before the invention or knowledge of the substance to which it now gives its name.[12] In its earlier signification, it was expressive of strong inhalation through the nostrils, or descriptive of any impatience. Hence arose the expressions in use in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to “snuff pepper” or “take in snuff.” Shakespeare makes a similar use of the phrase in Henry IV., in connection with a small box of perfume displayed by a courtier to the annoyance of Hotspur.