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Rural letters and other records of thought at leisure
Rural letters and other records of thought at leisure Author:Nathaniel Parker Willis Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LETTER IV. Mr Dear Doctor : Your letters, like yourself, travel in the best ot company. What should come with your last, hut a note from our friend Stetson of... more » the Astor, forwarding a letter which a traveller had left in the bronze vase, with " something enclosed which feels like a key." "A key," quotha! Attar of jasmine, subtle as the breath of the prophet from Constantinople by private hand ! No less! The small gilt bottle, with its cubical edge and cap of parchment, lies breathing before me. I think you were not so fortunate as to meet Bartlett, the draughtsman of the American Scenery—the best of artists in his way, and the pleas- antest of John Bulls, any way. He travelled with me a summer here, making his sketches, and has since been sent by the same enterprising publisher, (Virtue, of Ivy Lane,) to sketch in the Orient. (" Stand by," as Jack says, for something glorious from that quarter.) Well—pottering about the Bezestein, he fell in with my old friend Mustapha, the attar-merchant, who lifted the silk curtains for him, and, over sherbet and spiced coffee in the inner divan, questioned him of America—a country which, to Mustapha's fancy, is as far beyond the moon as the moon is beyond the gilt tip of the seraglio. Bartlett told him the sky wasround in that country, and the women faint and exquisite as his own attar. Upon which Mustapha took his pipe from his mouth, and praised Allah. After stroking the smoke out of his beard, and rolling his idea over the whites of his eyes for a few minutes, the old merchant pulled, from under the silk cushion, a visiting card, once white, but stained to a deep orange with the fingering of his fat hand, unctuous from bath-hour to bath-hour with the precious oils he trafficks in. When Bartlett assured him he had seen me in America, (it wa...« less