Book Description

My Lady Nicotine "—a book that suggests but is very unlike " The Reveries of a Bachelor." The former is urban : the latter is provincial. A briar pipe filled with Arcadia Mixture starts the reveries in the one ; a hearth fire, in the other. The five bachelors in " My Lady Nicotine " seem to be utterly dissimilar in tastes and feelings—and have only one bond of union, their common love for the famous Arcadia Mixture. The solemnity with which they treat their pipes; their assured superiority to everybody outside of the circle which knows and appreciates that mysterious brand of tobacco ; the sentimental selfishness of their bachelor existence, and the delicate humor with which the quiet episodes are narrated—these are some of the charming qualities of the book. But the crowning humor of it is that the story is told by one of their number who boldly announces in the first chapter that he has married, and his wife has won him from his pipe and his comrades. He cheaply moralizes on their enslavement, and then in reveries calls up the happy days when he smoked with them. The closing chapter is a most subtle piece of writing. The narrator praises his constancy to his promise never to smoke again, and adds: " I have not even any craving for the Arcadia now, though it is a tobacco that should only be smoked by our greatest men." Then he confesses that when his wife is asleep and all the house is still, he sits with his empty briar in his mouth, and listens to the taps of a pipe in the hands of a smoker (whom he has never seen) on the other side of the wall. " When the man through the wall lights up I put my cold pipe in my mouth and we have a quiet hour together."