reverie in Havana.]

The insult direct in cigar etiquette is for the party to whom you
apply for a light, to pass on and leave you with the remains of his
cigar, or to intimate to you, by word or action, that he has no
further use for it, and that you can throw it away. In Cuba, where
cigars are plentiful, the usual custom is, when you ask for a light,
even if the party be a stranger, to pull out your case and offer him a
cigar, by way of recognizing the civility in stopping to accommodate
you. The Spaniards are naturally a polite people, and the stranger
stepping into the Louvre and other public places of resort in Havana,
is struck at once with the marked contrast in this respect to familiar
gatherings elsewhere. In no place is a cigar more enjoyable than in
Havana. Seated upon the roof of one of the large hotels in that city
in a bright moonlight night, within hearing of the dreamy roll on the
beach: the regular throb of the sea, lulling one into quietness; the
sigh of the summer breeze a lullaby to the senses; while a
high-flavored prime cigar, as it wastes and floats away in air, is
the fairy wand which opens the enchanted gates of Reverie and
Imagination.

What need of a friend under such soothing circumstances? What need of
the jolly _camarade_ of former days to sigh back sigh for sigh, puff
for puff, and wander in gentle reminiscences over the Lesbian
labyrinth of the past, when Julia was most kind, or Cynthia, darling
girl, delighted in the perfume of a capital havana? Here, in this
quaint old city by the sea, is the place for dreams and reveries and
the utter rendering of one's self up--to a good cigar. Is it not a
place for reverie? Has not one with this most respectable weed, this
prime _havana_, the concomitants of a thousand reveries? Will not one
puff of that narcotic breath drowse deep all watching dragons, and
make for him the sleeping beauties of his will? And, _presto_, there
they are! and, oh! ye houris of the South, with what a smile and
glance between the azure puffs! Well let me not forget myself. With a
sterner morality he sees how the bending Bedouin fashions his pipe in
the moistened ground; he sees the slender Indian reed with the flat
bowls of Lahore and Oude, the pipe of the Anglo-eyed celestial, the
red clay of Bengal, and the glittering gilded cups in which the
dark-skinned races of Siam, the Malacca Isles, and the Philippines,
love to enshrine their dreamy opium-haunted spirits of the w