Concerning Tobacco

As concerns tobacco, there are many superstitions. And the

chiefest is this--that there is a STANDARD governing the matter,

whereas there is nothing of the kind. Each man's own preference

is the only standard for him, the only one which he can accept,

the only one which can command him. A congress of all the

tobacco-lovers in the world could not elect a standard which

would be binding upon you or me, or would even much influence us.



The next superstition is that a man has a standard of his own.

He hasn't. He thinks he has, but he hasn't. He thinks he can

tell what he regards as a good cigar from what he regards as a

bad one--but he can't. He goes by the brand, yet imagines he goes

by the flavor. One may palm off the worst counterfeit upon him;

if it bears his brand he will smoke it contentedly and never suspect.



Children of twenty-five, who have seven years experience,

try to tell me what is a good cigar and what isn't.

Me, who never learned to smoke, but always smoked;

me, who came into the world asking for a light.



No one can tell me what is a good cigar--for me. I am the

only judge. People who claim to know say that I smoke the worst

cigars in the world. They bring their own cigars when they come

to my house. They betray an unmanly terror when I offer them

a cigar; they tell lies and hurry away to meet engagements

which they have not made when they are threatened with the

hospitalities of my box. Now then, observe what superstition,

assisted by a man's reputation, can do. I was to have twelve

personal friends to supper one night. One of them was as

notorious for costly and elegant cigars as I was for cheap and

devilish ones. I called at his house and when no one was looking

borrowed a double handful of his very choicest; cigars which cost

him forty cents apiece and bore red-and-gold labels in sign of

their nobility. I removed the labels and put the cigars into a

box with my favorite brand on it--a brand which those people all

knew, and which cowed them as men are cowed by an epidemic. They

took these cigars when offered at the end of the supper, and lit

them and sternly struggled with them--in dreary silence, for

hilarity died when the fell brand came into view and started

around--but their fortitude held for a short time only; then they

made excuses and filed out, treading on one another's heels with

indecent eagerness; and in the morning when I went out to observe

results the cigars lay all between the front door and the gate.

All except one--that one lay in the plate of the man from whom I

had cabbaged the lot. One or two whiffs was all he could stand.

He told me afterward that some day I would get shot for giving

people that kind of cigars to smoke.



Am I certain of my own standard? Perfectly; yes, absolutely

--unless somebody fools me by putting my brand on some other kind

of cigar; for no doubt I am like the rest, and know my cigar by

the brand instead of by the flavor. However, my standard is a

pretty wide one and covers a good deal of territory. To me,

almost any cigar is good that nobody else will smoke, and to me

almost all cigars are bad that other people consider good.

Nearly any cigar will do me, except a Havana. People think they

hurt my feelings when then come to my house with their life

preservers on--I mean, with their own cigars in their pockets.

It is an error; I take care of myself in a similar way. When I

go into danger--that is, into rich people's houses, where, in the

nature of things, they will have high-tariff cigars, red-and-gilt

girded and nested in a rosewood box along with a damp sponge,

cigars which develop a dismal black ash and burn down the side

and smell, and will grow hot to the fingers, and will go on

growing hotter and hotter, and go on smelling more and more

infamously and unendurably the deeper the fire tunnels down

inside below the thimbleful of honest tobacco that is in the

front end, the furnisher of it praising it all the time and

telling you how much the deadly thing cost--yes, when I go into

that sort of peril I carry my own defense along; I carry my own

brand--twenty-seven cents a barrel--and I live to see my family

again. I may seem to light his red-gartered cigar, but that is

only for courtesy's sake; I smuggle it into my pocket for the

poor, of whom I know many, and light one of my own; and while he

praises it I join in, but when he says it cost forty-five cents I

say nothing, for I know better.



However, to say true, my tastes are so catholic that I have

never seen any cigars that I really could not smoke, except those

that cost a dollar apiece. I have examined those and know that

they are made of dog-hair, and not good dog-hair at that.



I have a thoroughly satisfactory time in Europe, for all

over the Continent one finds cigars which not even the most

hardened newsboys in New York would smoke. I brought cigars with

me, the last time; I will not do that any more. In Italy, as in

France, the Government is the only cigar-peddler. Italy has

three or four domestic brands: the Minghetti, the Trabuco, the

Virginia, and a very coarse one which is a modification of the

Virginia. The Minghettis are large and comely, and cost three

dollars and sixty cents a hundred; I can smoke a hundred in seven

days and enjoy every one of them. The Trabucos suit me, too; I

don't remember the price. But one has to learn to like the

Virginia, nobody is born friendly to it. It looks like a rat-

tail file, but smokes better, some think. It has a straw through

it; you pull this out, and it leaves a flue, otherwise there

would be no draught, not even as much as there is to a nail.

Some prefer a nail at first. However, I like all the French,

Swiss, German, and Italian domestic cigars, and have never cared

to inquire what they are made of; and nobody would know, anyhow,

perhaps. There is even a brand of European smoking-tobacco that

I like. It is a brand used by the Italian peasants. It is loose

and dry and black, and looks like tea-grounds. When the fire is

applied it expands, and climbs up and towers above the pipe, and

presently tumbles off inside of one's vest. The tobacco itself

is cheap, but it raises the insurance. It is as I remarked in

the beginning--the taste for tobacco is a matter of superstition.

There are no standards--no real standards. Each man's preference

is the only standard for him, the only one which he can accept,

the only one which can command him.



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THE BEE



It was Maeterlinck who introduced me to the bee. I mean, in

the psychical and in the poetical way. I had had a business

introduction earlier. It was when I was a boy. It is strange

that I should remember a formality like that so long; it must be

nearly sixty years.



Bee scientists always speak of the bee as she. It is

because all the important bees are of that sex. In the hive

there is one married bee, called the queen; she has fifty

thousand children; of these, about one hundred are sons; the rest

are daughters. Some of the daughters are young maids, some are

old maids, and all are virgins and remain so.



Every spring the queen comes out of the hive and flies away

with one of her sons and marries him. The honeymoon lasts only

an hour or two; then the queen divorces her husband and returns

home competent to lay two million eggs. This will be enough to

last the year, but not more than enough, because hundreds of bees

are drowned every day, and other hundreds are eaten by birds, and

it is the queen's business to keep the population up to standard

--say, fifty thousand. She must always have that many children

on hand and efficient during the busy season, which is summer, or

winter would catch the community short of food. She lays from

two thousand to three thousand eggs a day, according to the

demand; and she must exercise judgment, and not lay more than are

needed in a slim flower-harvest, nor fewer than are required in a

prodigal one, or the board of directors will dethrone her and

elect a queen that has more sense.



There are always a few royal heirs in stock and ready to

take her place--ready and more than anxious to do it, although

she is their own mother. These girls are kept by themselves, and

are regally fed and tended from birth. No other bees get such

fine food as they get, or live such a high and luxurious life.

By consequence they are larger and longer and sleeker than their

working sisters. And they have a curved sting, shaped like a

scimitar, while the others have a straight one.



A common bee will sting any one or anybody, but a royalty

stings royalties only. A common bee will sting and kill another

common bee, for cause, but when it is necessary to kill the queen

other ways are employed. When a queen has grown old and slack

and does not lay eggs enough one of her royal daughters is

allowed to come to attack her, the rest of the bees looking on at

the duel and seeing fair play. It is a duel with the curved

stings. If one of the fighters gets hard pressed and gives it up

and runs, she is brought back and must try again--once, maybe

twice; then, if she runs yet once more for her life, judicial

death is her portion; her children pack themselves into a ball

around her person and hold her in that compact grip two or three

days, until she starves to death or is suffocated. Meantime the

victor bee is receiving royal honors and performing the one royal

function--laying eggs.



As regards the ethics of the judicial assassination of the

queen, that is a matter of politics, and will be discussed later,

in its proper place.



During substantially the whole of her short life of five or

six years the queen lives in Egyptian darkness and stately

seclusion of the royal apartments, with none about her but

plebeian servants, who give her empty lip-affection in place of

the love which her heart hungers for; who spy upon her in the

interest of her waiting heirs, and report and exaggerate her

defects and deficiencies to them; who fawn upon her and flatter

her to her face and slander her behind her back; who grovel

before her in the day of her power and forsake her in her age and

weakness. There she sits, friendless, upon her throne through

the long night of her life, cut off from the consoling sympathies

and sweet companionship and loving endearments which she craves,

by the gilded barriers of her awful rank; a forlorn exile in her

own house and home, weary object of formal ceremonies and

machine-made worship, winged child of the sun, native to the free

air and the blue skies and the flowery fields, doomed by the

splendid accident of her birth to trade this priceless heritage

for a black captivity, a tinsel grandeur, and a loveless life,

with shame and insult at the end and a cruel death--and condemned

by the human instinct in her to hold the bargain valuable!



Huber, Lubbock, Maeterlinck--in fact, all the great

authorities--are agreed in denying that the bee is a member of

the human family. I do not know why they have done this, but I

think it is from dishonest motives. Why, the innumerable facts

brought to light by their own painstaking and exhaustive

experiments prove that if there is a master fool in the world, it

is the bee. That seems to settle it.



But that is the way of the scientist. He will spend thirty

years in building up a mountain range of facts with the intent to

prove a certain theory; then he is so happy in his achievement

that as a rule he overlooks the main chief fact of all--that his

accumulation proves an entirely different thing. When you point

out this miscarriage to him he does not answer your letters; when

you call to convince him, the servant prevaricates and you do not

get in. Scientists have odious manners, except when you prop up

their theory; then you can borrow money of them.



To be strictly fair, I will concede that now and then one of

them will answer your letter, but when they do they avoid the

issue--you cannot pin them down. When I discovered that the bee

was human I wrote about it to all those scientists whom I have

just mentioned. For evasions, I have seen nothing to equal the

answers I got.



After the queen, the personage next in importance in the

hive is the virgin. The virgins are fifty thousand or one

hundred thousand in number, and they are the workers, the

laborers. No work is done, in the hive or out of it, save by

them. The males do not work, the queen does no work, unless

laying eggs is work, but it does not seem so to me. There are

only two million of them, anyway, and all of five months to

finish the contract in. The distribution of work in a hive is as

cleverly and elaborately specialized as it is in a vast American

machine-shop or factory. A bee that has been trained to one of

the many and various industries of the concern doesn't know how

to exercise any other, and would be offended if asked to take a

hand in anything outside of her profession. She is as human as a

cook; and if you should ask the cook to wait on the table, you

know what will happen. Cooks will play the piano if you like,

but they draw the line there. In my time I have asked a cook to

chop wood, and I know about these things. Even the hired girl

has her frontiers; true, they are vague, they are ill-defined,

even flexible, but they are there. This is not conjecture; it is

founded on the absolute. And then the butler. You ask the

butler to wash the dog. It is just as I say; there is much to be

learned in these ways, without going to books. Books are very well,

but books do not cover the whole domain of esthetic human culture.

Pride of profession is one of the boniest bones in existence,

if not the boniest. Without doubt it is so in the hive.





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