es, violins, and poems. The meerschaum is but
a poor affair until it has burned a thousand offerings to the
cloud-compelling deities. It comes to us without complexion or flavor,
born of the sea-foam, like Aphrodite, but colorless as _pallida Mors_
herself. The fire is lighted in its central shrine, and gradually the
juices which the broad leaves of the Great Vegetable had sucked up from
an acre and curdled into a drachm are diffused through its thirsting
pores. First a discoloration, then a stain, and at last a rich, glowing,
umber tint spreading over the whole surface. Nature true to her old
brown autumnal hue, you see,--as true in the fire of the meerschaum
as in the sunshine of October! And then the cumulative wealth of its
fragrant reminiscences! he who inhales its vapors takes a thousand
whiffs in a single breath; and one cannot touch it without awakening
the old joys that hang around it, as the smell of flowers clings to the
dresses of the daughters of the house of Farina!

[Don't think I use a meerschaum myself, for _I do not_, though I have
owned a calumet since my childhood, which from a naked Pict (of the
Mohawk species) my grandsire won, together with a tomahawk and beaded
knife-sheath; paying for the lot with a bullet-mark on his right
cheek. On the maternal side I inherit the loveliest silver-mounted
tobacco-stopper you ever saw. It is a little box-wood Triton, carved
with charming liveliness and truth; I have often compared it to a figure
in Raphael's "Triumph of Galatea." It came to me in an ancient shagreen
case,--how old it is I do not know,--but it must have been made since
Sir Walter Raleigh's time. If you are curious, you shall see it any
day. Neither will I pretend that I am so unused to the more perishable
smoking contrivance, that a few whiffs would make me feel as if I lay
in a groundswell on the Bay of Biscay. I am not unacquainted with
that fusiform, spiral-wound bundle of chopped stems and miscellaneous
incombustibles, the cigar, so called, of the shops,--which to "draw"
asks the suction-power of a nursling infant Hercules, and to relish, the
leathery palate of an old Silenus. I do not advise you, young man, even
if my illustration strikes your fancy, to consecrate the flower of your
life to painting the bowl of a pipe, for, let me assure you, the stain
of a reverie-breeding narcotic may strike deeper than you think for. I
have seen the green leaf of early promise grow brown before its time
u