Concerning Tobacco

by Mark Twain

As concerns tobacco, there are many superstitions. And thechiefest is this--that there is a STANDARD governing the matter,whereas there is nothing of the kind. Each man's own preferenceis the only standard for him, the only one which he can accept,the only one which can command him. A congress of all thetobacco-lovers in the world could not elect a standard whichwould 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 cantell what he regards as a good cigar from what he regards as abad one--but he can't. He goes by the brand, yet imagines he goesby 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 theonly judge. People who claim to know say that I smoke the worstcigars in the world. They bring their own cigars when they cometo my house. They betray an unmanly terror when I offer thema cigar; they tell lies and hurry away to meet engagementswhich they have not made when they are threatened with thehospitalities of my box. Now then, observe what superstition,assisted by a man's reputation, can do. I was to have twelvepersonal friends to supper one night. One of them was asnotorious for costly and elegant cigars as I was for cheap anddevilish ones. I called at his house and when no one was lookingborrowed a double handful of his very choicest; cigars which costhim forty cents apiece and bore red-and-gold labels in sign oftheir nobility. I removed the labels and put the cigars into abox with my favorite brand on it--a brand which those people allknew, and which cowed them as men are cowed by an epidemic. Theytook these cigars when offered at the end of the supper, and litthem and sternly struggled with them--in dreary silence, forhilarity died when the fell brand came into view and startedaround--but their fortitude held for a short time only; then theymade excuses and filed out, treading on one another's heels withindecent eagerness; and in the morning when I went out to observeresults 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 Ihad cabbaged the lot. One or two whiffs was all he could stand.He told me afterward that some day I would get shot for givingpeople 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 kindof cigar; for no doubt I am like the rest, and know my cigar bythe brand instead of by the flavor. However, my standard is apretty wide one and covers a good deal of territory. To me,almost any cigar is good that nobody else will smoke, and to mealmost all cigars are bad that other people consider good.Nearly any cigar will do me, except a Havana. People think theyhurt my feelings when then come to my house with their lifepreservers on--I mean, with their own cigars in their pockets.It is an error; I take care of myself in a similar way. When Igo into danger--that is, into rich people's houses, where, in thenature of things, they will have high-tariff cigars, red-and-giltgirded and nested in a rosewood box along with a damp sponge,cigars which develop a dismal black ash and burn down the sideand smell, and will grow hot to the fingers, and will go ongrowing hotter and hotter, and go on smelling more and moreinfamously and unendurably the deeper the fire tunnels downinside below the thimbleful of honest tobacco that is in thefront end, the furnisher of it praising it all the time andtelling you how much the deadly thing cost--yes, when I go intothat sort of peril I carry my own defense along; I carry my ownbrand--twenty-seven cents a barrel--and I live to see my familyagain. I may seem to light his red-gartered cigar, but that isonly for courtesy's sake; I smuggle it into my pocket for thepoor, of whom I know many, and light one of my own; and while hepraises it I join in, but when he says it cost forty-five cents Isay nothing, for I know better.However, to say true, my tastes are so catholic that I havenever seen any cigars that I really could not smoke, except thosethat cost a dollar apiece. I have examined those and know thatthey are made of dog-hair, and not good dog-hair at that.I have a thoroughly satisfactory time in Europe, for allover the Continent one finds cigars which not even the mosthardened newsboys in New York would smoke. I brought cigars withme, the last time; I will not do that any more. In Italy, as inFrance, the Government is the only cigar-peddler. Italy hasthree or four domestic brands: the Minghetti, the Trabuco, theVirginia, and a very coarse one which is a modification of theVirginia. The Minghettis are large and comely, and cost threedollars and sixty cents a hundred; I can smoke a hundred in sevendays and enjoy every one of them. The Trabucos suit me, too; Idon't remember the price. But one has to learn to like theVirginia, nobody is born friendly to it. It looks like a rat-tail file, but smokes better, some think. It has a straw throughit; you pull this out, and it leaves a flue, otherwise therewould 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 caredto inquire what they are made of; and nobody would know, anyhow,perhaps. There is even a brand of European smoking-tobacco thatI like. It is a brand used by the Italian peasants. It is looseand dry and black, and looks like tea-grounds. When the fire isapplied it expands, and climbs up and towers above the pipe, andpresently tumbles off inside of one's vest. The tobacco itselfis cheap, but it raises the insurance. It is as I remarked inthe beginning--the taste for tobacco is a matter of superstition.There are no standards--no real standards. Each man's preferenceis the only standard for him, the only one which he can accept,the only one which can command him.------------------------------------------------------------------THE BEEIt was Maeterlinck who introduced me to the bee. I mean, inthe psychical and in the poetical way. I had had a businessintroduction earlier. It was when I was a boy. It is strangethat I should remember a formality like that so long; it must benearly sixty years.Bee scientists always speak of the bee as she. It isbecause all the important bees are of that sex. In the hivethere is one married bee, called the queen; she has fiftythousand children; of these, about one hundred are sons; the restare daughters. Some of the daughters are young maids, some areold maids, and all are virgins and remain so.Every spring the queen comes out of the hive and flies awaywith one of her sons and marries him. The honeymoon lasts onlyan hour or two; then the queen divorces her husband and returnshome competent to lay two million eggs. This will be enough tolast the year, but not more than enough, because hundreds of beesare drowned every day, and other hundreds are eaten by birds, andit is the queen's business to keep the population up to standard--say, fifty thousand. She must always have that many childrenon hand and efficient during the busy season, which is summer, orwinter would catch the community short of food. She lays fromtwo thousand to three thousand eggs a day, according to thedemand; and she must exercise judgment, and not lay more than areneeded in a slim flower-harvest, nor fewer than are required in aprodigal one, or the board of directors will dethrone her andelect a queen that has more sense.There are always a few royal heirs in stock and ready totake her place--ready and more than anxious to do it, althoughshe is their own mother. These girls are kept by themselves, andare regally fed and tended from birth. No other bees get suchfine food as they get, or live such a high and luxurious life.By consequence they are larger and longer and sleeker than theirworking sisters. And they have a curved sting, shaped like ascimitar, while the others have a straight one.A common bee will sting any one or anybody, but a royaltystings royalties only. A common bee will sting and kill anothercommon bee, for cause, but when it is necessary to kill the queenother ways are employed. When a queen has grown old and slackand does not lay eggs enough one of her royal daughters isallowed to come to attack her, the rest of the bees looking on atthe duel and seeing fair play. It is a duel with the curvedstings. If one of the fighters gets hard pressed and gives it upand runs, she is brought back and must try again--once, maybetwice; then, if she runs yet once more for her life, judicialdeath is her portion; her children pack themselves into a ballaround her person and hold her in that compact grip two or threedays, until she starves to death or is suffocated. Meantime thevictor bee is receiving royal honors and performing the one royalfunction--laying eggs.As regards the ethics of the judicial assassination of thequeen, 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 orsix years the queen lives in Egyptian darkness and statelyseclusion of the royal apartments, with none about her butplebeian servants, who give her empty lip-affection in place ofthe love which her heart hungers for; who spy upon her in theinterest of her waiting heirs, and report and exaggerate herdefects and deficiencies to them; who fawn upon her and flatterher to her face and slander her behind her back; who grovelbefore her in the day of her power and forsake her in her age andweakness. There she sits, friendless, upon her throne throughthe long night of her life, cut off from the consoling sympathiesand sweet companionship and loving endearments which she craves,by the gilded barriers of her awful rank; a forlorn exile in herown house and home, weary object of formal ceremonies andmachine-made worship, winged child of the sun, native to the freeair and the blue skies and the flowery fields, doomed by thesplendid accident of her birth to trade this priceless heritagefor a black captivity, a tinsel grandeur, and a loveless life,with shame and insult at the end and a cruel death--and condemnedby the human instinct in her to hold the bargain valuable!Huber, Lubbock, Maeterlinck--in fact, all the greatauthorities--are agreed in denying that the bee is a member ofthe human family. I do not know why they have done this, but Ithink it is from dishonest motives. Why, the innumerable factsbrought to light by their own painstaking and exhaustiveexperiments prove that if there is a master fool in the world, itis the bee. That seems to settle it.But that is the way of the scientist. He will spend thirtyyears in building up a mountain range of facts with the intent toprove a certain theory; then he is so happy in his achievementthat as a rule he overlooks the main chief fact of all--that hisaccumulation proves an entirely different thing. When you pointout this miscarriage to him he does not answer your letters; whenyou call to convince him, the servant prevaricates and you do notget in. Scientists have odious manners, except when you prop uptheir theory; then you can borrow money of them.To be strictly fair, I will concede that now and then one ofthem will answer your letter, but when they do they avoid theissue--you cannot pin them down. When I discovered that the beewas human I wrote about it to all those scientists whom I havejust mentioned. For evasions, I have seen nothing to equal theanswers I got.After the queen, the personage next in importance in thehive is the virgin. The virgins are fifty thousand or onehundred thousand in number, and they are the workers, thelaborers. No work is done, in the hive or out of it, save bythem. The males do not work, the queen does no work, unlesslaying eggs is work, but it does not seem so to me. There areonly two million of them, anyway, and all of five months tofinish the contract in. The distribution of work in a hive is ascleverly and elaborately specialized as it is in a vast Americanmachine-shop or factory. A bee that has been trained to one ofthe many and various industries of the concern doesn't know howto exercise any other, and would be offended if asked to take ahand in anything outside of her profession. She is as human as acook; and if you should ask the cook to wait on the table, youknow 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 tochop wood, and I know about these things. Even the hired girlhas her frontiers; true, they are vague, they are ill-defined,even flexible, but they are there. This is not conjecture; it isfounded on the absolute. And then the butler. You ask thebutler to wash the dog. It is just as I say; there is much to belearned 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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