They came out to me in badly battered and disreputable-looking old square pasteboard boxes, two hundred in a box.
George brought a box, which was caved in on all sides, looking the worst it could, and began to pass them around.

The conversation had been brilliantly animated up to that moment--but now a frost fell upon the company.

That is to say, not all of a sudden, but the frost fell upon each man as he took up a cigar and held it poised in the air--and there, in the middle, his sentence broke off.

That kind of thing went on all around the table, until when George had completed his crime the whole place was full of a thick solemnity and silence.
Those men began to light the cigars.

Rev.Dr.Parker was the first man to light.