from the kitchen fire, with the ordinary tongs, and applying it to the
pipe-bowl; but the old ember-tongs are seldom seen. They may still be
found in some farmhouses and country cottages, which have not been
raided by the agents of dealers in antique furniture and implements,
but examples are rare. This is a digression, however, which has
carried us far away from the early years of the seventeenth century.

It is pretty clear that not a few of the druggists who sold tobacco
were great rascals. Ben Jonson has let us into some of their secrets
of adulteration--the treatment of the leaf with oil and the lees of
sack, the increase of its weight by other artificial additions to its
moisture, washing it in muscadel and grains, keeping it in greased
leather and oiled rags buried in gravel under ground, and by like
devices. Other writers speak of black spice, galanga, aqua vitæ,
Spanish wine, aniseeds and other things as being used for purposes of
adulteration.

Trickery of another kind is revealed in a scene in Chapman's play "A
Humorous Day's Mirth," 1599. A customer at an ordinary says: "Hark
you, my host, have you a pipe of good tobacco?" "The best in the
town," says mine host, after the manner of his class. "Boy, dry a
leaf." Quietly the boy tells him, "There's none in the house, sir," to
which the worthy host replies _sotto voce_, "Dry a dock leaf." But the
diner's potations must have been powerful if they had left him unable
to distinguish between the taste of tobacco and that of dried
dock-leaf.

Sometimes coltsfoot was mixed with tobacco. Ursula, the pig-woman and
refreshment-booth keeper in Bartholomew Fair, in Ben Jonson's play of
that name, says to her assistant: "Threepence a pipe-full I will have