"If Shakespeare's contemporaries were silent about the then new fashion of smoking, we should not so much wonder at Shakespeare's taciturnity. But Decker's and Ben Jonson's works abound in allusions to tobacco, its uses and abuses. The humorist and satirist lost no opportunity of deriding the new fashion and its followers. The tobacco merchant was an important person in London of James the First's time--with his Winchester pipes, his maple cutting-blocks, his juniper-wood charcoal fires, and his silver tongs with which to hand the hot charcoal to his customers, although he was shrewdly suspected of adulterating the precious weed with sack lees and oil. It was his custom to wash the tobacco in muscadel and grains, and to keep it moist by wrapping it in greased leather, and oiled rags, or by burying it in gravel. The Elizabethan pipes were so small that now when they are dug up in Ireland the poor call them 'fairy pipes' from their tininess. These pipes became known by the nickname of 'the woodcock's heads.' The apothecaries, who sold the best tobacco, became masters of the art, and received pupils, whom they taught to exhale the smoke in little globes, rings, or the 'Euripus.' 'The slights' these tricks were called. Ben Jonson facetiously makes these professors boast of being able to take three whiffs, then to take horse, and evolve the smoke--one whiff on Hounslow, a second at Staines, and a third at Bagshot.