Читать книгу The Seven Sisters of Sleep. Popular History of the Seven Prevailing Narcotics of the World онлайн

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Amongst the Rocky Mountain Indians, it is a universal practice to indulge in smoking, and when they do so they saturate their bodies in smoke. They use but little tobacco, mixing with it a plant which renders the fume less offensive. It is a social luxury, for the enjoyment of which, they form a circle, and only one pipe is used. The principal chief begins by drawing three whiffs, the first of which he sends upward, and then passes the pipe to the person next in dignity, and in like manner the instrument passes round until it comes to the first chief again. He then draws four whiffs, the last of which he blows through his nose, in two columns, in circling ascent, as through a double flued chimney; and their pipes are not of the race stigmatized by Knickerbocker as plebeian. None of the smoke of those villanous short pipes, continually ascending in a cloud about the nose, penetrating into and befogging the cerebellum, drying up all the kindly moisture of the brain, and rendering the people who use them vapourish and testy; or, what is worse, from being goodly, burly, sleek-conditioned men, to become like the Dutch yeomanry who smoked short pipes, a lantern-jawed, smoke-dried, leathern-hided race. The red people, whether of the Rocky mountains or of the Mississippi, belonged to the aristocracy of the long pipes. Let us hope that they have not degenerated, and become followers of the customs of the barbarian ultra-marines.