He sees on beach by the sea the summer idler sitting beneath the jutting rock, gazing far out upon the sea, yet ignoring the white sails that pass up and down before him, as well as the open volume upon his knee, while his thoughts float outward and upward with the graceful wreaths of smoke that encircle his head; and if of a practical turn, he listlessly wonders why, if his own delightful land furnishes some twentieth of the whole Tobacco produce of the world, and does honor to her native weed by being its mightiest consumer, why, in the name of all disasters, the product is so dear--ay, doubly dear? And thus as his pipe burns low, a hundred other statistics; then, knocking out his whitened ashes on the floor, he reads sedately (his pipe being out) that the "Tobacco plant furnishes ashes to the amount of one-fourth of its bulk, being a much greater proportion than that of any other vegetable product," and, moreover, that "Tobacco exhausts the soil at the ratio of fourteen tons of wheat to one of Tobacco!" Oh, base insinuation! But, as he relights his pipe, and the graceful vapor circles in fresh buoyancy and grace before him, he only, in his contented mind, retains that one supreme expression--"_One ton of Tobacco!_" Ah, "Think of it, picture it Now, if you can!" From "A Paper of Tobacco,"[63] we extract the following humorous description of Yankee cigar smokers, which to a certain extent is true to life, but like most of the articles descriptive of American life by English Authors, who travel in America and write _a book_ afterwards, it is exaggerated or overdrawn: [Footnote 63: London, 1839.] [Illustration: An American smoker.]