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Updated: June 20, 2025
A week later Billy and I sat on the veranda of the company's hash-foundry, figuring up our time and smoking our cob meerschaums, when one of the boys who had been to the office, placed two letters in Billy's hands. One of them was directed in the handwriting that used to be on the old Thursday letters. Billy tore it open eagerly and his own letter to Josephine dropped into his hand.
Thus, the tobacco shops are ornamented outside with various highly-colored pictures, drawn by artists of the most florid genius, representing cigar-boxes, pipes, meerschaums, narghillas, bunches of cigars, snuffboxes, plugs and twists of tobacco, and all that the most fastidious smoker, chewer, or snuffer can expect to find in any tobacco shop, besides a good many things that he never will find in any of these shops.
I now began to calculate how I could become owner of the meerschaums prior to dispatching them by parcel-post to my brother without paying for them. That was my way of putting it. I calculated that by giving up my daily paper I should save thirteen shillings in six months. After all, why should I take in a daily paper?
Secondarily, his occupation was to start the colouring of new meerschaums for Mr. Swarbrick. Non-meerschaum smokers may not know what a delicate task this is, but once well begun the rest is comparatively easy. The tall policeman was an artist at the work; but it nearly brought him to a tragic end, as I will relate.
To look through plate-glass windows, and pity the brown soldiers, or sneer at the black ones? to reduce the speed of trotting horses a second or two below its old minimum? to color meerschaums? to flaunt in laces, and sparkle in diamonds? to dredge our maidens' hair with gold-dust? to float through life, the passive shuttlecocks of fashion, from the avenues to the beaches, and back again from the beaches to the avenues?
Then came the two Germans, complacently smoking their meerschaums, and attending to their dray and horses, which latter, unlike their masters, were of a very restless turn of mind. After these came a party of six, among whom was Gregory and two lively Frenchmen, who kept up an incessant chattering.
A man who may be called at a moment's warning into the fragrant boudoir of suffering loveliness should not unsweeten its atmosphere with reminiscences of extinguished meerschaums.
"Yes," said Marianne, "it's the fashion to talk as if all the extravagance of the country was perpetrated by women. For my part, I think young men are just as extravagant. Look at the sums they spend for cigars and meerschaums, an expense which hasn't even the pretense of usefulness in any way; it's a purely selfish, nonsensical indulgence.
The old woman had evidently been so "started" that she needed the sedative of a short clay pipe, highly colored indeed, still a connoisseur in meerschaums would scarcely covet it. This she would remove from her mouth now and then, as she crouched on a low stool in the chimney- corner, to shake her head ominously. Perhaps she knew more about whippoorwills than she admitted.
Having first consulted my fellow-traveller, he had despatched directions to the judge to adjourn the case till the morrow, who, like a good and obliging neighbour, had accordingly done so. The little town was unusually alive and excited that evening. Karl Gurtler was the centre of an admiring circle, who soon enveloped him in the incense of their meerschaums.
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