deities.  It comes to us without complexion or flavor,—­born of the sea-foam, like Aphrodite, but colorless as pallida Mors herself.  The fire is lighted in its central shrine, and gradually the juices which the broad leaves of the Great Vegetable had sucked up from an acre and curdled into a drachm are diffused through its thirsting pores.  First a discoloration, then a stain, and at last a rich, glowing, umber tint spreading over the whole surface.  Nature true to her old brown autumnal hue, you see,—­as true in the fire of the meerschaum as in the sunshine of October!  And then the cumulative wealth of its fragrant reminiscences! he who inhales its vapors takes a thousand whiffs in a single breath; and one cannot touch it without awakening the old joys that hang around it as the smell of flowers clings to the dresses of the daughters of the house of Farina!

[Don’t think I use a meerschaum myself, for I do not, though I have owned a calumet since my childhood, which from a naked Pict (of the Mohawk species) my grandsire won, together with a tomahawk and beaded knife-sheath; paying for the lot with a bullet-mark on his right check.  On the maternal side I inherit the loveliest silver-mounted tobacco-stopper you ever saw.  It is a little box-wood Triton, carved with charming liveliness and truth; I have often compared it to a figure in Raphael’s “Triumph of Galatea.”  It came to me in an ancient shagreen case,—­how old it is I do not know,—­but it must have been made since Sir Walter Raleigh’s time.  If you are curious, you shall see it any day.  Neither will I pretend that I am so unused to the more perishable smoking contrivance that a few whiffs would make me feel as if I lay in a ground-swell on the Bay of Biscay.  I am not unacquainted with that fusiform, spiral-wound bundle of chopped stems and miscellaneous incombustibles, the cigar, so called, of the shops,—­which to “draw” asks the suction-power of a nursling infant Hercules, and to relish, the leathery palate of an old Silenus.  I do not advise you, young man, even if my illustration strike your fancy, to consecrate the flower of your life to painting the bowl of a pipe, for, let me assure you, the stain of a reverie-breeding narcotic may strike deeper than you think for.  I have seen the green leaf of early promise grow brown before its time under such Nicotian regimen, and thought the umbered meerschaum was dearly bought at the cost of a brain enfeebled and a will enslaved.]

Violins, too,—­the sweet old Amati!—­the divine Stradivarius!  Played on by ancient maestros until the bow-hand lost its power and the flying fingers stiffened.  Bequeathed to the passionate, young enthusiast, who made it whisper his hidden love, and cry his inarticulate longings, and scream his untold agonies, and wail his monotonous despair.  Passed from his dying hand to the cold virtuoso, who let it slumber in its case for a generation, till, when