eed. 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 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
weird array of Arab camels, bowing their long necks tufted with
crimson braids, and measuring the brown sands of the desert with
ghost-like tread. 'Tis the moon of Egypt and the waters of the Nile;
'tis the palm-bough waves for him; and women, free-limbed, with
flashing eyes, and antique water-vases on their heads, move past him
from the low-rimmed shadowy wells. And he sees them there and smiles.

[Illustration: By the sea.]

He sees on beach by the sea the summer idler sitting beneath the
jutting rock, gazing far out upon the sea, yet ignoring the white
sails that pass up and down before him, as well as the open volume
upon his knee, while his thoughts float outward and upward with the
graceful wreaths of smoke that encircle his head; and if of a
practical turn, he listlessly wonders why, if his own delightful land
furnishes some twentieth of the whole Tobacco produce of the world,
and does honor to her native weed by being its mightiest consumer,
why, in the name of all disasters, the product is so dear--ay, doubly
dear? And thus as his pipe burns low, a hundred other statistics;
then, knocking out his whitened ashes on the floor, he reads sedately
(his pipe being out) that the "Tobacco plant furnishes ashes to the
amount of one-fourth of its bulk, being a much greater proportion than
that of any other vegetable product," and, moreover, that "Tobacco
exhausts the soil at the ratio of fourteen tons of wheat to one of
Tobacco!" Oh, base insinuation! But, as he relights his pipe, and the
graceful vapor circles in fresh buoyancy and grace before him, he
only, in his contented mind, retains that one supreme expression--"