I cannot light up in a wind.  It is too precious a rite to be consummated in a draught.  I hide behind a tree, a wall, a hedge, or bury my head in my coat.  People see me in the street, vainly seeking shelter.  It is a weakness, though not a shameful one.  But set me in a tavern corner, and fill the pouch with “Quiet Moments” (do you know that English mixture?) and I am yours to the last ash.

I wonder after all what was the sweetest pipe I ever smoked?  I have a tender spot in memory for a fill of Murray’s Mellow that Mifflin and I had in the old smoking room of the Three Crowns Inn at Lichfield.  We weren’t really thirsty, but we drank cider there in honour of Dr. Johnson, sitting in his chair and beneath his bust.  Then there were those pipes we used to smoke at twilight sitting on the steps of 17 Heriot Row, the old home of R.L.S. in Edinburgh, as we waited for Leerie to come by and light the lamps.  Oh, pipes of youth, that can never come again!

When George Fox was a young man, sorely troubled by visions of the devil, a preacher told him to smoke tobacco and sing hymns.

Not such bad advice.

HAY FEBRIFUGE

Our village is remarkable.  It contains the greatest publisher in the world, the most notable department store baron (and inventor of that new form of literary essay, the department store ad.), the most fragrant gas tanks in the Department of the East, the greatest number of cinders per eye of any arondissement served by the R——­ railway, and the most bitterly afflicted hay fever sufferer on this sneezing sphere.  Also the editor of the most widely circulated magazine in the world, and the author of one of the best selling books that ever was written.

Not bad for one village.

Your first thought is Northampton, Mass., but you are wrong.  That is where Gerald Stanley Lee lives.  For a stamped, addressed envelope I will give you the name of our village, and instructions for avoiding it.  It is bounded on the north by goldenrod, on the south by ragweed, on the east by asthma and the pollen of anemophylous plants.

It is bounded on the west by a gray stone facsimile of Windsor Castle, confirmed with butlers, buttresses, bastions, ramparts, repartees, feudal tenures, moats, drawbridges, posterns, pasterns, chevaux de frise, machicolated battlements, donjons, loopholes, machine-gun emplacements, caltrops, portcullises, glacis, and all the other travaux de fantaisie that make life worth living for retired manufacturers.  The general effect is emetic in the extreme.  Hard by the castle is a spurious and richly gabled stable in the general style of the chateau de Chantilly.  One brief strip of lawn constitutes a gulf of five hundred years in architecture, and restrains Runnymede from Versailles.

Our village is famous for beautiful gardens.  At five o’clock merchants and gens de lettres return home from office and tannery, remove the cinders, and commune with vervain and bergamot.  The countryside is as lovely as Devonshire, equipped with sky, trees, rolling terrain, stewed terrapin, golf meads, nut sundaes, beagles, spare tires, and other props.  But we are equally infamous for hideous houses, of the Chester A. Arthur era.  Every prospect pleases, and man alone is vile.