most exquisite shades of sentiment in this wondrous weed. What a
luxury, after months of dreary longing--what an oasis in the desert of
life! No attar of roses could be sweeter than that paper of fine-cut.
I played with it--just titillating the nostrils--for hours before I
dared to descend to the coarse process of chewing. And then--ah
heavens! can mortal mixture ever equal that first chew again! How
bright and beautiful the world looked! What happy remembrances I
reveled in all that day, of serenades, and oyster-suppers, and pretty
girls, and a thousand other fascinations of early youth, all of which
grew out of a paper of fine-cut.

My experiences in Sweden were even more delightful in this respect
than in Russia. At Stockholm I saw drunken men every day, and at
Gottenburg it was the prevailing trait. The trouble was to see a man
who was not laboring under a pressure of bricks in his hat. On one
occasion I must have seen in the course of a single afternoon several
hundred reeling home in the highest possible condition of
ecstasy--either that, or the streets were so badly paved, and the
roads so devious and undulating, that they made people stagger to keep
straight. It was on the occasion of a fair, and may perhaps have been
an exception to the general rule. One thing is certain--it looked very
natural, and made me cotton wonderfully to these good people. There
was something really homelike in a reeling, staggering crowd--their
shouts and uproarious songs, their boozy faces and tobacco-stained
months. Every body seemed to be on a regular "bender." The only point
of difference between the Swedish and the California "bender" was in
the way the boys hugged and kissed the peasant-girls; but even in this
respect a similitude may sometimes be found in the vicinity of the
Indian Reservations, where I have seen Digger damsels treated quite as
affectionately. However, it was all right, so long as both parties
were willing. I rather liked the Gottenburg custom myself--as a
spectator, of course.

My last and perhaps most agreeable experience connected with the
pleasures of sympathy occurred in Norway, on the road from Christiania
to Trondhjem. With profound humiliation I make the confession that I
have never yet been able to eradicate a natural passion for tobacco.
Once, after reading the Rev. Dr. Cox's terrific book on the Horrors of
Tobacco, in which it was conclusively shown that a single drop of the
oil of this noxious weed