"A thousand miles--by your leave."

"Or without it."

"Or without it--a thousand miles, sir, on a back trail, through forests
that blossom like gigantic gardens in May with flowers sweeter than our
white water-lilies abloom on trees that bear glossy leaves the year
round; through thickets that spread great, green, many-fingered hands at
you, all adrip with golden jasmine; where pine wood is fat as bacon;
where the two oaks shed their leaves, yet are ever in foliage; where the
thick, blunt snakes lie in the mud and give no warning when they deal
death. So far, sir, I trail you, back to the soil where your baby
fingers first dug--soil as white as the snow which you are yet to see
for the first time in your life of twenty-three years. A land where
there are no hills; a land where the vultures sail all day without
flapping their tip-curled wings; where slimy dragon things watch from
the water's edge; where Greek slaves sweat at indigo-vats that draw
vultures like carrion; where black men, toiling, sing all day on the
sea-islands, plucking cotton-blossoms; where monstrous horrors, hornless
and legless, wallow out to the sedge and graze like cattle--"

"Man! You picture a hell!" I said, angrily, "while I come from
paradise!"

"The outer edges of paradise border on hell," he said. "Wait! Sniff that
odor floating."

"It is jasmine!" I muttered, and my throat tightened with a homesick
spasm.