the Pursuits, the Amenities, the Miseries,
of literature; but the polite world has yet
much to learn concerning that Muse. Was her
inspiration to be had for the paying for, and did
she give credit? By-the-by, she was sometimes
called Coy, and I have heard her designated
as Intrepid; but that was in a birthday ode
about the battle of Dettingen. Her personal
history, manners, and customs, are, however,
shrouded in mystery. The sum of what the
literary gentlemen have told us in her regard is
this: that she played upon a Lyre, and resided
on a Mount.

It is a very painful and humiliating thing to
be fain to confess that, on the threshold of an
article which will not contain one line of poetry,
but will be of the very plainest prose on the very
plainest of subjects, I would give my ears to
find a Muse who, for a reasonable consideration,
would permit me to invoke her, and would
Inspire my Lay, and enable me to get to the
end of it without committing five hundred blunders.
Is there a Muse of Memory? I am
afraid there is not: but it is a Muse of that
kind I wish to apostrophise. And if I
addressed her as Snuffy, or as Smoky, or even as
Cloudy, I should be deemed either stupid or
irreverent. Still, I desire no less than a Muse
who is given to taking tobacco, a Muse who
smokes a pipe, a Muse who can twist a cigarito;
but chiefly a Muse who will make me remember
things. It is my ardent wish to return once
more to the island of Cuba, and to relate as
much as I can call to mind about the famous
cigars of Havana. I mentioned some months
since that I was a teetotum, and when I last
addressed the reader-- on the subject, I believe,
of the Havana one-horse chaises—I was in the
Kärnthner Strasse in Vienna. I have spun
round most violently since I last took that
liberty. Dear me! where is Havana and all
my lore about cigars? My note-book is at the
bottom of the Lake of Garda; and I know that
I began an article on cigars, one morning, at
Trieste, wrote the next paragraph at Milan,
and cancelled both as too digressional, at
Samaden, in the canton of the Grisons. Just
now, as I sit down despondingly, and wish
I had attended the lectures of the professor
who discourses on memory at the Royal
Polytechnic Institution, the bells of Santa
Maria della Salute at VENICE strike twelve at
midnight, and my Muse, hitherto coy to
churlishness, appears, and grants me all I wish. She
is a nut-brown Muse—nay, darker than the
nut: as dark as chocolate. She is round, and
smooth, and graceful, and is deliriously
fragrant. I take her up very tenderly between
my finger and thumb, and, pressing her to my
lips, bite off her nose. Then do I apply the
flame of a waxen taper to her feet, and I begin
to smoke my Muse. Straightway, in the spiral
whirls of blue incense curling from my last
cigar, the inspiration which I needed glides
softly down upon me. Cuba comes back. The
ghosts of a hundred memories start, up, and
drum cheerfully on the lids of rose-coloured
coffins. Wars and rumours of wars, camps,
cities, seas, storms, and sick-beds, all fade
away, and here I am in the Calle del Teniente
Rey at Havana, bargaining with a volante-
driver to take me and a companion to the great
tobacco-factory of La Honradez.

I remember it all. I went over the establishment,
say only yesterday. First, we found out a
dark counting-house in a darker street down
town: both made artificially sombre by screens
and curtains—for the sun was salamandering
about with his usual ferocity outside-- and sought
Don Domingo. Most courteous of clerks in a
Cuban banking-house was he. A tawny man
with a close-cropped head of silver-grey, like an
over-ripe orange slightly mildewed at top, his
thews and sinews all dried in the sun, like
South American dried beef, but given, like
that under the action of warm water, to
becoming quite soft and tender when you were
admitted to his intimacy. Don Domingo was
intimately acquainted with the proprietors of
La Honradez. To judge from the very high-
dried odour which continually hung about him,
he must have spent at La Honradez, himself, a
handsome annual income in snuff and cigars.
He gave us a Regalia apiece, to keep us in good
spirits until we reached the factory, and then
we picked our way through a maze of packing-cases
and strong boxes, and, reaching La
Calle del Teniente Rey, bargained, as I have
said, with a volante-driver, and were soon set
down before the portal of which we were in
quest.

I think the place had been, prior to the
suppression of the monastic orders, a convent. It
was large enough to have been that, or a barrack,
or a penitentiary. The walls were amazingly
thick; but the windows, few as they were in
number, were neither so rare nor so thickly
grated but that the odour of fresh-chopped
tobacco came gushing through them, like
telegraphic messages from the State of Virginia
and the Vuelta de Abaco. Have you ever driven
along the Paris Boulevards at very early morning?
Have you ever noticed the fragrance
issuing from the cafes on your line of route—
the smell of the coffee roasting and grinding for
the day's consumption? The garçons bring their
mills on to the pavement, and, from six to seven
A.M. the Boulevards smell like Araby the Blest.
Substitute tobacco for coffee, and you have the
street savour of La Honradez. Penetrating
into the great Patio, the aroma became, perhaps,
a trifle too forcible. It was as that, say, of the
most delicate devil's dust thrown up by the
sweetest shoddy-mills. It was as though you
were off some guano islands, the haunt only of
birds of paradise. It is nevertheless certain
that the air was laden with impalpable powder;
that a sirocco of small-cut speedily filled your
mouth, ears, and nostrils, and the pores of your
skin; and that your first salutation to La
Honradez was a violent fit of sneezing. The
court-yard was full of broken boxes and the
banana-leaf or maize-straw wrappers of tobacco
bales, long since minced, and twisted, and