276 REVERIES. 



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 reminis- 

 cences 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 render- 

 ing 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 weed. He sees how in the squatter's hut the 

 old squaw sits by her hunter lord, and puffs at the corn-cob 

 sweetness, and how by lonely ways the traveler rests and 

 thinks of home, and in the blue smoke greets once more the 

 faces of the loved, perhaps forever gone. He sees how the 

 Esquimaux, with his hollow Walrus-tooth, makes bearable 

 the stifling squalor of his den ; or, sterner and graver still, 

 Borne item of historic lore mingles rudely with his dreams, 

 and elbows sharply the airy spirits of his smoke-engendered 

 thoughts. Softly tremble in the delicate blue mist and the 

 azure spirals from his old Virginia clay the domes of a sea- 

 bathed city. Loftily pierce the tall white minarets into the 

 quivering heavens, while the solemn cypress throws its shade 

 below. Before him,* silent-paced as in a dream, files the 



