CIGARS

"The poet may sing of the leaf of the rose, And call it the purest and sweetest that blows; But of all the leaves
that ever were tried, Give me the tobacco leaf rolled up and dried."
The smoking of cigars is now considered the best as it is the most fashionable mode of using the weed. The
word cigar is from the Spanish cigarro, and signifies a cylindrical roll of tobacco leaves, made of short pieces
or shreds of the leaves divested of the stem and wound about with a binder, and enveloped in a portion of the
leaf known by the name of wrapper--acute at one end and truncated at the other. In the East Indies a sort of
cigar called cheroot is also made with both ends truncated. The smoking of tobacco in the form of cigars is
doubtless the most general as well as the most ancient mode of its use. When Columbus landed in Hispaniola,
the sailors saw the natives smoking the leaves of a plant, "the perfume of which was fragrant and grateful."
But while cigars are of very ancient origin in the West Indies, they were not generally known in Europe until
the beginning of the Nineteenth Century. In fact, of all the various works on gastronomy and the pleasures of
the table, written and published from 1800 to 1815, not one speaks of this now indispensable adjunct of a
good dinner. Even Britlat-Savarin, in his Physiologie du Gout, entirely ignores tobacco and all its distractions
and charms. Benzo gives the following account of the manufacture of a cigar in Hispaniola:--
"They take a leafe from the stalks of their great bastard corn (which we commonly called Turkie--wheat)
together with one of these tobacco-leaves and fold them up together like a coffin of paper, such as grocers
make to put spices in, or like a small organ-pipe. Then putting one end of the same coffin to the fire, and
holding the other end in their mouths, they draw their breath to them. When the fire hath once taken at the
pipe's end, they draw forth so much smoke that they have their mouth, nose, throat, and head full of it; and, as
if they tooke a singular delight therein they never leave supping and drinking till they can sup no more, and
thereby loose their breath and their feeling."
Sahagun, in his "History of New Spain," speaks of the natives as using the leaves of tobacco rolled into cigars,
which they ignite and smoke in tubes of tortoise-shell or silver. The following article from the New York
Times contains much valuable information in regard to cigars, especially Havanas: