Letters: Ghandi's Watch Pocket

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To settle the cigaret controversy which has aroused many doubting Thomases to rise in defense of the "saintly" Frances Elizabeth Willard in an effort to wipe clean her nicotine-stained fingers, may I offer this tobacco episode as presented by Miss Willard herself in her autobiography, Glimpses of Fifty Years? The chapter head is "College Days," and the reference appears on pp. 116-117: ". . . I wish I had not had those months as a 'law unto myself,' though nothing worse occurred in them than I have told, except that one night Maggie and I dressed up as two pirates. I had been reading that greatest of pirate stories Jack Sheppard, the only one of its kind that I had ever seen, and we were planning for the adventures that were before us as highwaymen of the sea, and were using, I am sorry to say, as much of the language that such men would have used as we knew, which was not much, and, horrible to relate, were armed and equipped, not only with wooden pistols and bowie knives, but with a cigar apiece, and I am afraid that on the table before us stood a bottle of ginger-pop, which was as far as we dared to go in the direction of inebriation. We were not accustomed to estimate the permeating power of cigar smoke, whereby we were very soon given away; for there came a gentle rap at the door, and without waiting for any response, a tall, elegant woman came in, Miss Mary Dickinson, my division teacher. She it was who, entering my room each day, would run her finger along the window-frame to see if there had been careful dusting. It must, indeed, have been a spectacle to her to see a girl who never failed in her recitation room sitting, in the character I had assumed, beside another who was known as 'the wildest girl in school.' But Miss Dickinson had remarkable clearness of mental vision. She made no ado whatever, but said, 'Well, if this is not fortunate! The mosquitoes have almost driven me out of my room this hot summer night, and if you girls will just come in and smoke them out, it will be a great favor to me.' So we had to follow after her, in our high-top boots, and there we sat, as imperturbable as we knew how to be, but with very heightened color, I am sure, and she insisted on our smoking, while she threw up the windows and drove before her the fluttering mosquitoes. She never alluded to the subject afterward, neither reported nor reproved us, for she wisely reasoned that the charm in all we were doing was the daredevil character of the performance, and that if it was treated as a very commonplace affair, this charm would soon be gone. . . ."

And, while we are on the subject of prohibition, the following excerpt from the same source, appears on p. 306: ". . . Three things I did, once in awhile, during my two years and four months of foreign travel, that I never did and never do at home. I went to see sights on Sunday, went to the theatre, and took wine at dinner. . . ."

CHARLES FINSTON

Evanston, Ill.