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 Aavana, 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 lich 
the dark-skinned races of Siam, the Malacca Isles, and the 
Phillippines, 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, 
some item of historic lore mingles rudely with his dreams, 
and elbows sharply the airy spirits of his smoke-engendered 
‘thoughts. Softly tremble inthe 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 
