A cheap cigar; also (1839) a duck gun.
1830. The commodore … no more discomposed by the sight of a row of long thirty-two’s, that were within a hundred yards of him, than a Providence lady is at passing the fourfold row of long-nine-smoking beaux, that are regularly drawn up on Sunday forenoon in Market Square.—N. Ames, ‘A Mariner’s Sketches,’ pp. 213–4.
1833. No great shakes tho’ arter all, continued he, sitting on the windlass, talking apparently to himself, with a long nine in his mouth.—John Neal, ‘The Down-Easters,’ i. 45.
1835. How anxiously did I regard him, as slowly and deliberately he unfolded the wrapper; it contained two long-nine segars.—‘Harvardiana,’ i. 157.
1836. To walk Boston streets, not with a long nine in mouth.—Phila. Public Ledger, July 30.
[1839. He demanded very magisterially, “who I was, and what the devil I was doing with my long nine,” (meaning the duck gun,) “at the head of the company, marching like a bullfrog under a bean-pole?”—R. M. Bird, ‘Robin Day,’ i. 199.]
1842. The most prominent object seen in Chesnut Street was a “long nine,” with a fierce-looking buck of a colored fellow hanging to the end of it.—Phila. Spirit of the Times, April 18.
1844. The sugars were “long nines,” such as are made and sold in Massachusetts for a penny a grab.—Id., Nov. 5.
1847. Doubtless we had learned to affect smoking, but for the long dank American cigar, (‘nine inches long and nine for a cent,’) with which, when a lad, we took the initial of that soothing accomplishment.—Knick. Mag., xxx. 554 (Dec.).
1850. A man who was puffing a villanous ‘long-nine’ in the bar-room of a hotel in a western village.—Id., xxxv. 555 (June).
1851. Pete had, as he always had after breakfast, a cigar in his mouth, a long nine, though being in such close proximity to such a length of body as Pete extended, no one would have supposed it such.—Yale Lit. Mag., xvi. 315 (June).
1857. The sleepy-looking lawyer established a light at the end of a villanous long nine.—Knick. Mag., xlix. 67 (Jan.).
1857. He would … sway backward and forward like a loose ‘liberty-pole’ in a gale of wind. He had a ‘long-nine’ segar between his teeth, the upper end of which was crushed into the semblance of a tobacco-quid.—Id., 100.
1857. They were garnered by stable-boys smoking long-nines.—Holmes, ‘The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table,’ ch. ii.
