and mystery of smoking. That is to say, the last pipe of all before the
so-long indomitable intellect abdicates, and the body succumbs to
weariness.

No man of my acquaintance has ever given me a satisfactory definition of
_living_. An alternating systole and diastole, says physiology.
Chlorophyl becoming xanthophyl, says botany. These stir me not. I define
life as a process of the Will-to-Smoke: recurring periods of
consciousness in which the enjoyability of smoking is manifest,
interrupted by intervals of recuperation.

Now if I represent the course of this process by a graph (the co-ordinates
being Time and the Sense-of-by-the-Smoker-enjoyed-Satisfaction) the curve
ascends from its origin in a steep slant, then drops away abruptly at the
recuperation interval. This is merely a teutonic and pedantic mode of
saying that the best pipe of all is the last one smoked at night. It is
the penultimate moment that is always the happiest. The sweetest pipe
ever enjoyed by the skipper of the _Hesperus_ was the one he whiffed just
before he was tirpitzed by the poet on that angry reef.

The best smoking I ever do is about half past midnight, just before "my
eyelids drop their shade," to remind you again of your primary school
poets. After the toils, rebuffs, and exhilarations of the day, after
piaffing busily on the lethal typewriter or _schreibmaschine_ for some
hours, a drowsy languor begins to numb the sense. In dressing gown and
slippers I seek my couch; Ho, Lucius, a taper! and some solid,
invigorating book for consideration. My favourite is the General
Catalogue of the Oxford University Press: a work so excellently full of
learning; printed and bound with such eminence of skill; so noble a
repository or Thesaurus of the accumulated treasures of human learning,