rden-walks and public roads so
fearfully clean, every leaf and twig being swept up daily, and
preserved to manure the duchy, that during a pedestrian tour of three
days I was absolutely ashamed to spit any where. There was no possible
chance of doing it without expunging a soldier or a policeman, or
disfiguring the entire province. The result was, between
tobacco-juice, salt water, iron water, sulphur water, soda-water, and
all other sorts of water that came out of the earth from Brunnens of
Nassau, I got home as thin as a snake, and was forced to deny myself
even the poor consolation of a Frankfort cigar. So matters went on for
nearly a year. I became a morose and melancholy man. This will account
for all the bitter and ill-natured things I said of the Germans in
some of my sketches, every word of which I now retract.

But to come to the point of the narrative. In the due course of a
vagabond life, after visiting Russia and Sweden, I found myself one
day on the road from Lillehammer to the Dorre Fjeld in Norway. I sat
in a little cariole--an old peasant behind. The scenery was sublime.
Poetry crept over my inmost soul. The old man leaned over and said
something. Great heavens! What a combination of luxuries! His breath
smelled of whisky and tobacco. I was enchanted. I turned and gazed
fondly and affectionately in his withered old face. Two streams of
rich juice coursed down his furrowed chin. His leathery and wrinkled
mouth was besmeared with the precious fluid; his eyes rolled foolishly
in his head; he hung on to the cariole with a trembling and unsteady
hand; a delicious odor pervaded the entire man. I saw that he was a
congenial soul--cottoned to him at once--grasped him by the
hand--swore he was the first civilized human I had met in all my
travels through Europe--and called upon him, in the name of the great
American brotherhood of chewers, to pass me a bite of his tobacco.
From that moment we were the best of friends. The old man dived into
the depths of a greasy pocket, pulled out a roll of black pigtail, and
with joy beaming from every feature, saw me tear from it many a goodly
mouthful. We talked--he in Norwegian, I in a mixture of German and
English; we chewed; we spat; we laughed and joked; we forgot all the
discrepancies of age, nativity, condition, and future prospects; in
short, we were brothers, by the sublime and potent free-masonry of
tobacco. All that day my senses were entranced. I saw nothing but
f