" In Connecticut a man could by permission of the law smoke once if
he went on a journey of ten miles (as some slight solace for the arduous
trip), but never more than once a day, and never in another man's house.
Let us hope that on their lonely journeys they conscientiously obeyed the
law, though we can but suspect that the one unsocial smoke may have been a
long one. In some communities the colonists could not plant tobacco, nor
buy it, nor sell it, but since they loved the fascinating weed then as men
love it now, they somehow invoked or spirited it into their pipes, though
they never could smoke it in public unfined and unpunished. The shrewd and
thrifty New Haven people permitted the raising of it for purposes of trade,
though not for use, thus supplying the "devil's weed" to others, chiefly
the godless Dutch, but piously spurning it themselves--in public. Its use
was absolutely forbidden under any circumstances on the Sabbath within two
miles of the meeting-house, which (since at that date all the homes were
clustered around the church-green) was equivalent to not smoking it at all
on the Lord's Day, if the lav were obeyed. But wicked backsliders existed,
poor slaves of habit, who were in Duxbury fined ten shillings for each
offence, and in Portsmouth, not only were fined, but to their shame be it
told, set as jail-birds in the Portsmouth cage.
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