The value of a cigarette at the moment a meal has been completed, consists in the fact that after the first whiff or two of its fragrance the palate soon ceases to demand either food or wine. After smoke the power to appreciate good wine is lost, and no judicious host cares to open a fresh bottle from his best bin for the smoker, nor will the former be blamed by any man for a disinclination to do so. Moreover, tobacco is unquestionably an ally of temperance; certainly it is so in the estimation of the gourmet. A relationship for him of the most perfect order is that which subsists between coffee and fragrant smoke, While wine and tobacco are antipathetic, the one affecting injuriously all that is grateful in the other, the aroma of coffee " marries " perfectly with the perfume of the finest leaf. Among the Mussulmans this relationship is recognized to the fullest extent; and also throughout the Continent the use of coffee, which is almost symbolical of temperate habits, is intimately associated with the cigarette or cigar. Only by the uncultured classes of Great Britain and of other northern nations, who appear to possess the most insensitive palates in Europe, have smoke and alcoholic drinks been closely associated. By such, tobacco and spirit have been sought chiefly as drugs, and are taken mainly for their effects on the nervous system - the easy but disastrous means of becoming stupid, besotted, or drunk. People of cultivated tastes, on the other hand, select their tobacco or their wines, not for their qualities as drugs, but for those subtler attributes of flavour and perfume, which exist often in inverse proportion to the injurious narcotic ingredients; which latter are as much as possible, avoided, or are accepted chiefly for the sake of the former.

One wine during - a meal.

Tobacco after eating Coffee and Tobacco.

An ally of temperance: its relation to coffee, natural, and widely recognized.

Before quitting the subject of dining it must be said that, after all, those who drink water with that meal probably enjoy the pleasure of eating more than those who drink wine. They have generally better appetite and digestion, and they certainly preserve an appreciative palate longer than the wine-drinker. Water is so important an element to them, that they are not indifferent to its quality and source. As for the large class which cannot help itself in this matter, the importance of an ample supply of uncontaminated water cannot be overrated. The quality of that furnished to the population of London is happily now good, but the only mode of storing it possible to many often renders it dangerous to health. Disease and intemperance are largely produced by neglect in relation to these two matters. It would be invidious, perhaps, to say what particular question of home or foreign politics could be spared, that Parliament might discuss a matter of such pressing urgency as a pure water supply; or to specify what particular part of our enormous expenditure, compulsory and voluntary, might be better employed than at present, by placing a constant and ample supply of it within easy reach of the poorest consumer in town and country. But for those who can afford to buy bottled waters, no purer exists in any natural sources than that of our own Malvern springs, and these are aerated and provided in the form of soda and potash waters of unexceptionable quality.