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Rh, ‘not another cigar will touch these lips.' I never had a more valuable birthday present given to me, and I feel no less grateful to Mr. Oelkopf for it than to my husband.

"But what,' I asked him, ‘are you going to do with the three hundred and twenty-five dollars now? ‘Presumably,' he answered, ‘I am now going to have a better appetite and will make greater demands upon your larder. I shall also, now and then, feel like drinking a bottle of wine. I shall allow one hundred and twenty-five dollars for this. The remaining two hundred dollars I place at your disposal for the cause of liberty.'

"T cannot sufficiently express to Mr. Oelkopf how happy this resolve made me. But, at the same time, I could not help thinking, what great means liberty would have at its command if all the smokers who are its champions would turn the money, which they have hitherto puffed into the air in the form of tobacco smoke, into a liberty fund! What a great change could be brought about in the world by the general resolution to renounce tobacco in favor of liberty! And what a great pecuniary loss this would be to despots! Does not despotism, in Europe, as well as in America, live to a great extent from tobacco? The Italians stopped smoking in order to ruin the Austrians. Shall we not try, in America, to ruin the slave-holders of Virginia and Cuba by banishing their tobacco? It would be a double gain for liberty; an immense increase of the sinews of war