“Thank you; but no more just now. Fill your glass.”
“Presently, presently; do you drink on. Never mind me. Now that it strikes me, let me say, that he who, out of superfine gentility or fanatic morality, denies himself tobacco, suffers a more serious abatement in the cheap pleasures of life than the dandy in his iron boot, or the celibate on his iron cot. While for him who would fain revel in tobacco, but cannot, it is a thing at which philanthropists must weep, to see such an one, again and again, madly returning to the cigar, which, for his incompetent stomach, he cannot enjoy, while still, after each shameful repulse, the sweet dream of the impossible good goads him on to his fierce misery once more—poor eunuch!”
“I agree with you,” said the cosmopolitan, still gravely social, “but you don’t smoke.”
“Presently, presently, do you smoke on. As I was saying about——”
“But why don’t you smoke—come. You don’t think that tobacco, when in league with wine, too much enhances the latter’s vinous quality—in short, with certain constitutions tends to impair self-possession, do you?”
“To think that, were treason to good fellowship,” was the warm disclaimer. “No, no. But the fact is, there is an unpropitious flavor in my mouth just now. Ate of a diabolical ragout at dinner, so I shan’t smoke till I have washed away the lingering memento of it with wine. But smoke away, you, and pray, don’t forget to drink. By-the-way, while we sit here so companionably, giving loose to any companionable nothing, your uncompanionable friend, Coonskins, is, by pure contrast, brought to recollection. If he were but here now, he would see how much of real heart-joy he denies himself by not hob-a-nobbing with his kind.”
“Why,” with loitering emphasis, slowly withdrawing his cigar, “I thought I had undeceived you there. I thought you had come to a better understanding of my eccentric friend.”
“Well, I thought so, too; but first impressions will return, you know. In truth, now that I think of it, I am led to conjecture from chance things which dropped from Coonskins, during the little interview I had with him, that he is not a Missourian by birth, but years ago came West here, a young misanthrope from the other side of the Alleghanies, less to make his fortune, than to flee man. Now, since they say trifles sometimes effect great results, I shouldn’t wonder, if his history were probed, it would be found that what first indirectly gave his sad bias to Coonskins was his disgust at reading in boyhood the advice of Polonius to Laertes—advice which, in the selfishness it inculcates, is almost on a par with a sort of ballad upon the economies of money-making, to be occasionally seen pasted against the desk of small retail traders in New England.”
“I do hope now, my dear fellow,” said the cosmopolitan with an air of bland protest, “that, in my presence at least, you will throw out nothing to the prejudice of the sons of the Puritans.”
“Hey-day and high times indeed,” exclaimed the other, nettled, “sons of the Puritans forsooth! And who be Puritans, that I, an Alabamaian, must do them reverence? A set of sourly conceited old Malvolios, whom Shakespeare laughs his fill at in his comedies.”