Said Babbalanja, “My lord, you school me.  But though I dissent from some of your positions, I am willing to confess, that this is not the first time a philosopher has been instructed by a man.”

“A demi-god, sir; and therefore I the more readily discharge my mind of all seriousness, touching the subject, with which you mortals so vex and torment yourselves.”

Silence ensued.  And seated apart, on both sides of the barge, solemnly swaying, in fixed meditation, to the roll of the waves, Babbalanja, Mohi, and Yoomy, drooped lower and lower, like funeral plumes; and our gloomy canoe seemed a hearse.

CHAPTER XVII 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  The stalks of the leaf withdrawn, the remainder they cut up, and mixed with soft willow-bark, and the aromatic leaves of the Betel.

“Ho!  Vee-Vee, bring forth the pipes,” cried Media.  And forth they came, followed by a quaint, carved cocoa-nut, agate-lidded, containing ammunition sufficient for many stout charges and primings.

Soon we were all smoking so hard, that the canopied howdah, under which we reclined, sent up purple wreaths like a Michigan wigwam.  There we sat in a ring, all smoking in council—­every pipe a halcyon pipe of peace.