but one day, and it was, I fear, long before my physician, and he was
wise, thought it prudent, I suddenly fell a prey to our lady Nicotia. I
had been reading listlessly a cruel essay in the _Atlantic_ on the
wickedness of smoking, and was presently seized with a desire to look at
King James's famous "counterblast" against the weed. One is like a
spoiled child at these times, and I sent off at once for the royal
fulmination, which I found dull enough. It led to results the monarch
could not have dreamed of. I got a full-flavored cigar, and had a
half-hour of worshipful incense-product at the shrine of the
brown-cheeked lady,--a thing to remember,--and which I had leisure
enough to repent of in the sleepless night it cost me.

This new keenness of perception, of taste and touch, of smell and sound,
belongs also, in the splendid rally which the body makes toward health,
to the intellectual and imaginative sphere of activities. Something of
the lost gifts of the fairy-land of childhood returns to us in fresh
aptitude for strange, sweet castle-building, as we lie open-eyed, or in
power to see, as the child sees, what we will when the eyes are
closed,--

Pictures of love and hate,
Grim battles where no death is. Tournaments,
Tall castles fair and garden terraces,
Where the stiff peacock mocks the sunset light,
And man and maiden whisper tenderly
A shadowy love where no heart ever breaks,--
Love whose to-morrow shall be as to-day.

With the increase of intellectual clearness, within a certain range,
come, as with the brightened senses, certain drawbacks, arising out of