In all the public
places of America, this filthy custom is recognised. In the courts
of law, the judge has his spittoon, the crier his, the witness his,
and the prisoner his; while the jurymen and spectators are provided
for, as so many men who in the course of nature must desire to spit
incessantly. In the hospitals, the students of medicine are
requested, by notices upon the wall, to eject their tobacco juice
into the boxes provided for that purpose, and not to discolour the
stairs. In public buildings, visitors are implored, through the
same agency, to squirt the essence of their quids, or 'plugs,' as I
have heard them called by gentlemen learned in this kind of
sweetmeat, into the national spittoons, and not about the bases of
the marble columns. But in some parts, this custom is inseparably
mixed up with every meal and morning call, and with all the
transactions of social life. The stranger, who follows in the
track I took myself, will find it in its full bloom and glory,
luxuriant in all its alarming recklessness, at Washington. And let
him not persuade himself (as I once did, to my shame) that previous
tourists have exaggerated its extent.
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