They Regale Themselves With Their Pipes


"Ho! mortals! mortals!" cried Media. "Go we to bury our dead? Awake,
sons of men! Cheer up, heirs of immortality! Ho, Vee-Vee! bring forth
our pipes: we'll smoke off this cloud."

Nothing so beguiling as the fumes of tobacco, whether inhaled through
hookah, narghil, chibouque, Dutch porcelain, pure Principe, or
Regalia. And a great oversight had it been in King Media, to have
omitted pipes among the appliances of this voyage that we went.
Tobacco in rouleaus we had none; cigar nor cigarret; which little the
company esteemed. Pipes were preferred; and pipes we often smoked;
testify, oh! Vee-Vee, to that. But not of the vile clay, of which
mankind and Etruscan vases were made, were these jolly fine pipes of
ours. But all in good time.

Now, the leaf called tobacco is of divers species and sorts. Not to
dwell upon vile Shag, Pig-tail, Plug, Nail-rod, Negro-head, Cavendish,
and misnamed Lady's-twist, there are the following varieties:--Gold-
leaf, Oronoco, Cimaroza, Smyrna, Bird's-eye, James-river, Sweet-
scented, Honey-dew, Kentucky, Cnaster, Scarfalati, and famed Shiraz,
or Persian. Of all of which, perhaps the last is the best.

But smoked by itself, to a fastidious wight, even Shiraz is not gentle
enough. It needs mitigation. And the cunning craft of so mitigating
even the mildest tobacco was well understood in the dominions of
Media. There, in plantations ever covered with a brooding, blue haze,
they raised its fine leaf in the utmost luxuriance; almost as broad as
the broad fans of the broad-bladed banana. The stalks of the leaf