This is my favorite city. I was its patron saint in the early times before the reorganization of things, and I still have much influence here, and am greatly respected. When you intimate that there is anything of first excellence which one cannot get in Vienna, you hurt my feelings. You would not wish to hurt my feelings?”

“I? Indeed, no. Do not look at me like that, Durchlaucht; you break my heart. But what I have said is really the truth. Consider what this noble city smokes—latakia! It is true, just as I say. It smokes latakia, and fine-cut Turkish and Syrian ordure that burns your tongue and makes a mephitic odor which suffocates.”

We are a vain and thoughtless race. In criticising in this large and arrogant way other people’s tastes in the matter of tobacco I was satirizing myself, without for the moment being conscious of it. For it has been my habit to look down in a superior way upon persons who were so low in the scale of intelligence as to believe such a thing possible as the establishing of a standard of excellence in tobacco and cigars. Tastes in this matter seem to be infinite. Each man seems to have a standard of his own, and he also seems to be ashamed of the next man’s taste and hostile to his standard. I think that no one’s standard is steadfast, but is at all times open to change. When we travel, and are obliged to go without our favorite brand and take up with the cigar of the country we chance to be in, we presently find ourselves establishing that cigar as our standard. In Venice we are at first too good to smoke those cheap black rat-tail “Virginias” that have a straw through them, but a fortnight’s familiarity with them changes all that and we adopt the Virginia as our standard. In Florence and Rome we are sorry for a people who are condemned to smoke the cheap menghettis and trabucos, but soon we prefer them to any other cigars. In Germany, France and Switzerland we take less kindly to the native cigars; but in India we quickly come to believe that the Madras two-cent cigar is much better than the Cuban cigar which costs twenty cents in New York. I must not claim to speak fairly and justly about high-priced cigars, for I have never bought any myself, and have not smoked other people’s when I could substitute a cheap one of my own without being discovered; for to my mind there is no cigar that is quite so vile and stenchy and inflammable as a twenty-cent Havana. This is probably a superstition; for I am well satisfied that all notions, of whatever sort, concerning cigars, are superstitions—superstitions and stupidities, and nothing else. It distresses me to hear an otherwise sane man talk about “good” cigars, and pretend to know what a good cigar is—as if by any chance his standard could be a standard for anybody else.

We have all noticed this—and it tells its own story: that when we go out to dine at another man’s house, we privately carry along a handful of cigars as a protection. We know that the chances are that his standard and ours will differ. We take his cigar, but we manage a substitution furtively. From long habit—backed by prejudice and superstition—I dread those high-priced Havanas with a fancy label around them; a label which costs the hundredth part of a cent, and augments the price of the cigar twenty-seven degrees beyond its value. I have accepted tons of those; and given them to the poor. It is not that I hate the poor, for I do not; but only because I cannot bring myself to waste anything, even a fancy-labeled execrable cigar.

Not more than two persons in eight hundred thousand know even their own cigars when they are outside of the box; they think they do, but that is another superstition. Years ago several friends of mine used to come to my house every Friday night to play billiards. They patiently smoked my cheap cigars and never said a wounding word about them. With one exception. That was a gentleman who thought he knew all about cigars, and whose opinion was like the rest of the world’s—not valuable. He had a high-priced brand of his own, and he did not like my cheap weeds.