Chapter 9 - Page 2

only may some time throw
off the habit, but when one gets to be such a victim to it that he chews
up cigars and cigarettes and plugs of pipe tobacco, it seems to me he is
incurable. It is not only a bad habit then; it amounts to a vice."

Mr. Pedagog was getting apoplectic. "You know well enough that I never
said the words you attribute to me," he said, sternly.

"Really, Mr. Pedagog," returned the Idiot, with an irritating shake of
his head, as if he were confidentially hinting to the School-Master to
keep quiet--"really you pain me by these futile denials. Nobody forced
you into the confession. You made it entirely of your own volition. Now
I ask you, as a man and brother, what's the use of saying anything more
about it? We believe you to be a person of the strictest veracity, but
when you say a thing before a tableful of listeners one minute, and deny
it the next, we are forced to one of two conclusions, neither of which is
pleasing. We must conclude that either, repenting your confession, you
sacrifice the truth, or that the habit to which you have confessed has
entirely destroyed your perception of the moral question involved. Undue
use of tobacco has, I believe, driven men crazy. Opium-eating has
destroyed all regard for truth in one whose word had always been regarded
as good as a government bond. I presume the undue use of tobacco can
accomplish the same sad result. By-the-way, did you ever try opium?"

"Opium is ruin," said the Doctor, Mr. Pedagog's indignation being so
great that he seemed to be unable to find the words he was evidently
desirous of hurling at the Idiot.

"It is, indeed," said the Idiot. "I knew a man once who smoked one little
pipeful of it, and, while under its influence, sat down at his table and
wrote a story of the supernatural order that was so good that everybody
said he must have stolen it from Poe or some other master of the weird,
and now nobody will have anything to do with him. Tobacco, however, in
the sane use of it, is a good thing. I don't know of anything that is
more satisfying to the tired man than to lie back on a sofa, of an
evening, and puff clouds of smoke and rings into the air. One of the
finest dreams I ever had came from smoking. I had blown a great mountain
of smoke out into the room, and it seemed to become real, and I climbed
to its summit and saw the most beautiful country at my feet--a country in
which all men were happy, where there were no troubles of any kind, where
no whim was left ungratified, where jealousies were not, and where every
man who made more than enough to live on paid the surplus into the common
treasury for the use of those who hadn't made quite enough. It was a