? Fall to, then, man, and don't stand on manners."

Whereon Yeo, seeing an old decayed willow by a brook, went to it, and
took therefrom some touchwood, to which he set a light with his knife
and a stone, while Amyas watched, a little puzzled and startled,
as Yeo's fiery reputation came into his mind. Was he really a
salamander-sprite, and going to warm his inside by a meal of burning
tinder? But now Yeo, in his solemn methodical way, pulled out of his
bosom a brown leaf, and began rolling a piece of it up neatly to the
size of his little finger; and then, putting the one end into his mouth
and the other on the tinder, sucked at it till it was a-light; and
drinking down the smoke, began puffing it out again at his nostrils with
a grunt of deepest satisfaction, and resumed his dog-trot by Amyas's
side, as if he had been a walking chimney.

On which Amyas burst into a loud laugh, and cried--

"Why, no wonder they said you breathed fire? Is not that the Indians'
tobacco?"

"Yea, verily, Heaven be praised! but did you never see it before?"

"Never, though we heard talk of it along the coast; but we took it for
one more Spanish lie. Humph--well, live and learn!"

"Ah, sir, no lie, but a blessed truth, as I can tell, who have ere now
gone in the strength of this weed three days and nights without eating;
and therefore, sir, the Indians always carry it with them on their
war-parties: and no wonder; for when all things were made none was made
better than this; to be a lone man's companion, a bachelor's friend,
a hungry man's food, a sad man's cordial, a wakeful man's sleep, and a
chilly man's fire, sir; while for stanching of wounds, purging of rheum,
and settling of the stomach, there's no herb like unto it under the
canopy of heaven."

The truth of which eulogium Amyas tested in after years, as shall be
fully set forth in due place and time. But "Mark in the meanwhile," says
one of the veracious chroniclers from whom I draw these facts, writing
seemingly in the palmy days of good Queen Anne, and "not having" (as he
says) "before his eyes the fear of that misocapnic Solomon James I. or
of any other lying Stuart," "that not to South Devon, but to North; not
to Sir Walter Raleigh, but to Sir Amyas Leigh; not to the banks of Dart,
but to the banks of Torridge, does Europe owe the day-spring of the
latter age, that age of smoke which shall endure and thrive, when the
age of brass shall have vanished like those of iron and o