ing to be unhealthy?" I ask anxiously. If she
does, there is nothing for it but to clutch at the nearest subway
station and hurry up to Grant's Tomb. In that bracing ether her spirits
revive.

So it was on this afternoon. My Utopian vision of a Chelsea in New York,
outdoing the grimy salons of Greenwich Village, fell in splinters at the
bottom of my mind. Sadly I looked upon the old Carl Schurz mansion on
the hill, and we departed for the airy plateaus of Central Park.
Desperately I pointed to the fading charms of East River Park--the
convent round the corner, the hokey pokey cart by the curbstone.

I shall never be a tugboat captain. It isn't healthy.

CONFESSIONS OF A SMOKER

True smokers are born and not made. I remember my grandfather with his
snowy beard gloriously stained by nicotine; from my first years I never
saw my father out of reach of his pipe, save when asleep. Of what avail
for my mother to promise unheard bonuses if I did not smoke until I was
twenty? By the time I was eight years old I had constructed a pipe of an
acorn and a straw, and had experimented with excelsior as fuel. From
that time I passed through the well-known stages of dried bean-pod
cigars, hayseed, corn silk, tea leaves, and (first ascent of the true
Olympus) Recruits Little Cigars smoked in a lumberyard during school
recess. Thence it was but a step to the first bag of Bull Durham and a
twenty-five-cent pipe with a curved bone stem.

I never knew the traditional pangs of Huck Finn and the other heroes of
fiction. I never yet found a tobacco that cost me a moment's unease--but
stay, there was a cunning mixture devised by some comrades at college
that harboured in its fragrant shreds neatly chopped sections of rubber
bands. That was sheer poison, I grant you.

The weed needs no new acolyte to hymn her sanctities. Where Raleigh,
Pepys, Tennyson, Kingsley, Calverley, Barrie, and the whimful Elia best
of all--where these have spoken so greatly, the feeble voice may well
shrink. But that is the joy of true worship: ranks and hierarchies are
lost, all are brothers in the mystery, and amid approving puffs of rich
Virginia the older saints of the mellow leaf genially greet the new
freshman, be he never so humble.

What would one not have given to smoke a pipe out with the great ones of
the empire! That wainscoted back parlour at the Salutation and Cat, for
instance, where Lamb and Coleridge used to talk into the small hours
"quaf