— the one stuffed with dry leaf?..

The story of my struggle with "nicotine" began three years ago, when I was in the hospital. The doctor reassured me about my health, and told me that the one thing hindering its course was a disturbance and irregularity of the mucous membranes. He asked me how many cigarettes I smoked each day, and I answered: "Forty, or a little more." He said my cough would grow worse if I stayed as I was, and that within five years I would reach a condition that would not please me; but the doctor's words went with the wind!

The mere thought of giving up smoking spun in my head and turned my life upside down! How could I abandon the cigarette — I, the journalist, who had taken it as the companion of my every coming and going? Naturally I refused to listen to the doctor's advice, but deep within me

I felt a certain shame: did I really depend to this extent on those fingers?

A year passed, and another after it, with the doctor's words in the wastebasket; but before long I felt his prophecy beginning to come true, for the cough grew worse and worse. I avoided going to the family doctor, who was as accustomed to smoking as I was — naturally his words would do me no good, and I would no doubt answer him: Physician, heal thyself! But he outwitted me where I least expected it. When I laid before him my string of complaints, he remarked that he himself had passed through this stage, and had been obliged to give up smoking. My heart sank at the news, and I began looking about me for a cigarette with which to forget what I had heard. He shook his head after examining my throat; he did not say I was threatened with cancer of the lung, but he hinted obliquely that my condition was unsatisfactory, and that the matter of saving my life came down to abstaining from smoking. And he decreed that I must stop completely for two months. Yet I went on smoking all that day, and every cigarette was a sentence of reproach and a reminder of my weak will. In the evening I was trying to light a cigarette when a wave of coughing took hold of me; I put it back in its place and told my wife that I would give up smoking that very night. And indeed I kept my word, and went about filling the ears of my family and friends with the effects that giving up smoking produces, remarking upon the weakness of everyone who smokes — not forgetting to hint at what an iron will I possessed... Yes, I had to choose: to smoke, and be weak; or to abstain, and prove truly what sort of character I am!