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It was the supreme test of our determination to win the war: the price of Missouri meerschaums went up 20 per cent and there was no insurrection. Yesterday we went out to buy our annual corncob, and were agreeably surprised to learn that the price is still six cents; but our friend the tobacconist said that it may go up again soon.
You are in the presence of humming-birds, not ostriches or owls. The people are smoking cigarettes, or cigars at worst, not meerschaums. The establishment itself is a dazzle of decoration, a little corner of the Louvre. There is no shouting or swearing, but a pleasing hum. The calls of messieurs and the replies of garçons resolve themselves into a confused lulling sound.
When we had partaken of some salmon and capercaillie, cooked after the Norwegian process where butter abounded, and had lighted our meerschaums, we went at a gallop homewards.
In one corner a newly imported German with an Orson-like head, thumb-ring, and the fragrance of many meerschaums still hovering about him, was hammering away upon some disputed point with a scientific Frenchman, whose national politeness was only equalled by his national volubility.
'He had unrivalled meerschaums, said Mr. Annesley, 'and he was most liberal. There are two. You know I never use them, but they are handsome furniture. 'Those Dalmaines are fine girls, said the Duke of St. James. 'Very pretty creatures! Do you know, Duke, said Annesley, 'I think the youngest one something like Miss Dacre. 'Indeed! I cannot say the resemblance struck me.
This occupied some little time; and after collecting a decent boatful, we lighted our meerschaums, and floated homewards. We might have proceeded nearly half way, when P suddenly dropped the pipe from his mouth, and seizing his gun, fired it towards the shore, from which we were not twenty feet, without uttering a word.
His published card, announcing the fact that he had permanently located in the city and was a patient candidate for the privilege of setting fractured limbs and administering medicine, somewhat dashed the expectations of many who conjected that the Grey estate could not possibly be worth the amount so long reputed, or the principal heir would certainly not soil his fingers with pills and plasters, instead of sauntering and dawdling with librettos, lorgnettes, meerschaums, and curiously-carved canes cut in the Hebrides or the jungles of Java.
Undoubtedly, I think, the first pipe is the sweetest; indeed, I feel bound to make a statement here. I have an uneasy feeling that I never did justice to meerschaums, and for this reason: I only smoked them after my brier was hot, so that I never gave them a fair chance. If I had begun the day with a meerschaum, might it not have shown itself in a new light?
"Do you think there will not come a day in which my meerschaums will be foul, and the French novels more than usually stupid, and life altogether such a dismal monotony that I shall want to get rid of it somehow or other?"
A young Austrian, who was watching a senorito light his wisp of paper for the fifth time, and mentally comparing it with the volcano volume and kern-deutsch integrity of purpose of the meerschaums of his native land, said to me: "What can you expect of a people who trifle in that way with the only work of their lives?"
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