A striking example of the attitude of the mid-nineteenth century days towards tobacco may be found in connexion with railways and railway travelling.  In the early days of such travel there were no smoking compartments, and indeed smoking was “strictly forbidden” practically everywhere on railway premises.  Relics of this time may still be seen in many stations and on many platforms in the shape of somewhat dingy placards announcing that smoking is strictly forbidden, and that the penalty is so much.  Nowadays the incense from pipes and cigars and cigarettes curls freely round these obsolete notices and helps to make them still dingier.  If you wanted to smoke when travelling you had either to contrive to get a compartment to yourself, or to arrange terms with your fellow-travellers.  In a Punch of 1855, Leech drew a railway-platform scene wherein figures one of those precocious youngsters of a type he loved to draw.  A railway porter says to his mate, as the two gaze at the back of this small swell, with his cane and top-hat, “What does he say, Bill?” “Why, he says he must have a compartment to hisself, because he can’t get on without his smoke!” Another drawing in a Punch of 1861 points the same moral.  It represents an elderly “party” and a “fast Etonian” seated side by side in a first-class compartment.  The latter has a cigar in one hand and with the other offers coins to his neighbour; the explanation is as follows:  “Old Party. Really, sir,—­I am the manager of the line, sir—­I must inform you that if you persist in smoking, you will be fined forty shillings, sir. Fast Etonian. Well, old boy, I must have my smoke; so you may as well take your forty shillings now!”

Tobacco was always popular in the army; and even the strongest of anti-tobacconists would have felt that there was at least something, if not much, to be said for the abused weed, when in times of campaigning suffering it played so beneficent a part in soothing and comforting weary and wounded men.  The period covered by this chapter included both the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny, and every one knows how the soldiers in the Crimea and in India alike craved for tobacco as for one of the greatest of luxuries, and how even an occasional smoke cheered and encouraged and sustained suffering humanity.  The late Dr. Norman Kerr, who was no friend to ordinary, everyday smoking, wrote:  “There are occasions, such as in the trenches during military operations, when worn out with exposure and fatigue, or when exhausted by slow starvation with no food in prospect, when a pipe or cigar will be a welcome and valuable friend in need, resting the weary limbs, cheering the fainting heart, allaying the gnawing hunger of the empty stomach.”