THE CHEW AND THE SMOKE

The cohorts of Law and Order, in their stiff-collared sobriety, received a severe shaking-up when they heard that a newly-elected Senator had been caught smoking in the Senate chamber. What sacrilege! to besmirch the sanctity of the room where Thomas Barton lived his dying years, where the Civil, Spanish, and Great Wars were conducted, where Webster, Clay, Sumner, and other great men of the past gathered in solemn conclave; where, indeed as Dickens once described, one could see "so many honorable members with swelled faces.... caused by the quantity of tobacco they contrive to stow within the hollow of the cheek. It is strange enough too, to see, an honorable gentleman leaning back in his tilted chair with his legs on the desk before him, shaping a convenient plug with his penknife, and when it is quite ready for use, shooting his old one from his mouth, as from a popgun, and clapping the new one in its place. I was surprised to observe that even steady old chewers of great experience are not always good marksmen.

Several.... frequently missed the spittoon at five paces, and one mistook the closed sash for the open window at three".

Since those days of the forties many changes have occurred. Swine no longer root up the mud in the Washington streets, and the mud has become shallow enough to make possible the use of trousers instead of rubber boots and knee breeches. The "City of Magnificent Intentions" has at last changed into the "City of Magnificent Distances", and at present is sedate and orderly enough.

But the unexampled audacity of the new member from the state where they smoke in the "halls of legislation" may be an indication that the worm is turning again. When the stogy, the pipe, and the "butt" obtain as strong a hold on the senatorial mouths as once had the "quid" and the "plug", the non-smoking rule perhaps will be abolished. Then a later-day Dickens looking on the majesty that is the Senate and beholding each man as a "smoke-vomiting chimney" may well be led to describe the Senate chamber as a "boundless furnace... where a suffocating wind the pilgrim smites with instant death".