Book Description

Excerpt from Pages From a Country Diary Happily the introduction of the post-prandial cigarette has robbed the country dinner party of one of its chief terrors, and I look back with a shudder to the days when, with a palate simply craving for tobacco, one was forced to sit drinking wine one did not want, with a prospect of two hours of bad whist, or worse music, before relief could be obtained. There is still one house in our neighbourhood, at which we occasionally dine, where our host sternly refuses to allow smoking in his dining room, a fact rendered all the more galling by his own indulgence in snuff as soon as the ladies have left the room. It must seem well-nigh incredible to the youth of the present generation that there was once a time, not so very distant either, when smokers in country houses were treated as a species of Ishmaelite, only allowed to indulge in their vicious habits in kitchens and servants halls after the legitimate occupants of these regions had retired to bed. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.