Page:Pagan papers.djvu/69

Rh wit, good drink,  'la dive bouteille;' except indeed when the liquor be bad, as is sometimes known to happen. Then it may serve in some sort as a sorry consolation. But to leave these airy substitutes, and come to smoking.

It hath been ofttimes debated whether the morning pipe be the sweeter, or that first pipe of the evening which 'Hesperus, who bringeth all good things,' brings to the weary with home and rest. The first is smoked on a clearer palate, and comes to unjaded senses like the kiss of one's first love; but lacks that feeling of perfect fruition, of merit recompensed and the goal and the garland won, which clings to the vesper bowl. Whence it comes that the majority give the palm to the latter. To which I intend no slight when I find the incense that arises at matins sweeter even than that of evensong. For, although with most of us who are labourers in the vineyard, toilers and swinkers, the morning pipe is smoked in hurry and fear and a sense of alarums and excursions and fleeting trains, yet with all this there are certain halcyon periods sure to arrive–Sundays, holidays, and the like—the whole joy and peace of which are summed up in that one beatific pipe after breakfast, smoked in a