five hundred for settling-day in the morning, and had not an idea how
to get it. There was not a trace of anxiety on him when he opened a low
arched door, passed down a corridor, and entered the warm, full light of
that chamber of liberty, that sanctuary of the persecuted, that temple
of refuge, thrice blessed in all its forms throughout the land,
that consecrated Mecca of every true believer in the divinity of the
meerschaum, and the paradise of the nargile--the smoking-room.

A spacious, easy chamber, too; lined with the laziest of divans, seen
just now through a fog of smoke, and tenanted by nearly a score of men
in every imaginable loose velvet costume, and with faces as well known
in the Park at six o'clock in May, and on the Heath in October; in Paris
in January, and on the Solent in August; in Pratt's of a summer's night,
and on the Moors in an autumn morning, as though they were features that
came round as regularly as the "July" or the Waterloo Cup. Some were
puffing away in calm, meditative comfort, in silence that they would not
have broken for any earthly consideration; others were talking hard
and fast, and through the air heavily weighted with the varieties of
tobacco, from tiny cigarettes to giant cheroots, from rough bowls full
of cavendish to sybaritic rose-water hookahs, a Babel of sentences rose
together: "Gave him too much riding, the idiot." "Take the field, bar
one." "Nothing so good for the mare as a little niter and antimony in
her mash." "Not at all! The Regent and Rake cross in the old strain,
always was black-tan with a white frill." "The Earl's as good a fellow
as Lady Flora; always give you a mount." "Nothing like a Kate Terry
though, on a bright day, for salmon." "Faster thing I never knew; found
at twenty minutes past eleven, and killed just beyond Longdown Water
at ten to twelve." All these various phrases were rushing in among each
other, and tossed across the eddies of smoke in the conflicting tongues
loosened in the tabagie and made eloquent, though slightly inarticulate,