Smoking a pound...

In a public room at Langdon Hills in Essex, the conversation chancing to turn on smoking, the farmer of the name of Williams, boasting of the great quantity of tobacco he could consume at a sitting, challenged the room to produce his equal. 

Mr. Bowtell, the proprietor of the great bootshop (in) Skinner Street, and remarkable for smoking pipes beyond computation, travelling his round at the time, chanced to be present and immediately agreed to enter the lists with five pounds a-side.

A canister of [Virginia] tobacco was placed by the side of each man at eight o'clock  in the evening, when they began the match.  Smoking very fast, by the time the clock had struck twelve, they each finished sixteen pipes when the farmer , through the dense atmosphere turned pale. 

He still continued, however, dauntlessly on, but at the end of the eighteenth pipe, fell stupefied off his chair. 

The victory was adjudged to his opponent who, calling for an extra glass of grog, actually finished his twentieth pipe before he retired for the night.