Harry was not the sort to be cured in one lesson. For perhaps a week he bought his own cigars, but he soon returned to our vest pockets. We tried burying the teeth of rubber combs in our perfectos, but he only tossed the doctored smoke aside and reached for another. In a Savannah hotel I encountered George K. Foster, a friend of my boyhood. Foster was traveling in the South for his firm, Foster Brothers and Fairchild, manufacturing chemists. He heard our grumblings about Davenport and suggested asafetida.
"It's probably the vilest-smelling stuff in the pharmacopœia," he explained, "a fetid gum resin, and a little of it will go a long way."
We rehearsed the plant as carefully as a new play. Foster provided a pellet of asafetida, and I enlisted the man at the hotel cigar counter as an accomplice. With a penknife we removed a conical section from the blunt end of a cigar, inserted the pellet and replaced the cone of tobacco. I then arranged the doctored cigar in next to last place in a box containing just six cigars.
Foster and the men of the company all dined together in the hotel.
As we got up from the table I said, "Gentle-
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