"In the early times of the introduction of tobacco, smokers in many countries were condemned to infamous and cruel punishments; had their noses and their lips cut off, and with blackened faces and mounted on an ass, exposed to the coarse jests of the vilest vagabonds and the insults of the multitude. But now the hangman smokes, and the criminal condemned to death smokes before being hanged. The king in his gilt coach smokes; and the assassin smokes who lies in wait to throw down before the feet of the horses the murderous bomb. The human family spends every year two thousand six hundred and seventy millions of francs (about a hundred millions in English money) on tobacco, which is not food, which is not drink, and without which it contrived to live for a long succession of ages. "In the discomfitures and disasters which befell the Army of Lavalle, in the civil wars of the Argentine Republic, the poor fugitives had to suffer the most horrible privations, which can be imagined. By degrees the tobacco came to an end, and the Argentines smoked dry leaves. One man, more fortunate than his comrades, continued to use with much economy the most precious of all his stores--tobacco. A fellow soldier begged to be allowed to put the economist's pipe in his own mouth, and thus to inhale at second-hand the adored smoke, paying two dollars for the privilege. What is more striking still, when, in 1843, the convicts in the prison of Epinal, France, who had for some time been deprived of tobacco, rose in revolt, their cry was 'tobacco or death!' When Col. Seybourg was marching in the interior of Surinam against negro rebels, and the soldiers had to bear the most awful hardships, they smoked paper, they chewed leaves and leather, and found the lack of tobacco the greatest of all their trials and torments." Elsewhere, inquiring what nervous aliments harmonize the one with the other, he says:-- "The only, the true, the legitimate companion of coffee is the nicotian plant; and wisely and well the Turkish epicures declare that for coffee--the drink of Heaven--tobacco is the salt. The smoke of a puro, of a manilla, or of real Turkish tobacco, which passes amorously through the voluptuous tip of amber, blends magnificently with the austere aroma of the coffee, and the inebriated palate is agitated between a caress and a rebuke." From a Southern paper we extract these whimsical lines. "On the Great Fall in the Price of Tobacco in 1801," by Hugh Montgomery, Lynchburgh, Va.,