But I am so weak that I return to it again and again, as a smoker does to his brier-wood.

They were alive and enjoying the sheer fact of life, writing letters home, rereading letters from home, looking at the pictures in illustrated papers, as they leaned back and smoked their brier-wood pipes and discussed politics with that freedom and directness of opinion which is an Englishman's pastime and his birthright.

No lieutenant looks younger for his years than this one in the Grenadier Guards, and he seems of the same type as the others when you see him marching with his regiment or off for a walk smoking a brier-wood pipe.

Acting upon Dodd's suggestion that we try and smoke them out, I took my brier-wood pipe from my pocket and proceeded to light it with one of those peculiar snapping lucifers which were among our most cherished relics of civilisation.

" I still held my brier-wood pipe in my hand, and I felt inclined to hurl it at the dapper head of the consequential little gentleman, but with such a girl standing by it would have been impossible to treat him with any disrespect, and as I looked at him I felt sure that his apparent superciliousness was probably the result of too much money and too little breeding.

On a black-walnut shelf between the windows lay a choice collection of meerschaum and brier-wood pipes.