settlement lay snugly couched in the mud, under cover of all this pestilent vapor." [Illustration: A Persian water pipe.] The Persians[52] are said to be the first to invent the mode of drawing tobacco smoke through water thereby cooling it before inhaling it. Fairholt says "it is to smoking what ice is to Champagne." The _London Review_ gives the following description of pipes and smoking apparatus: [Footnote 52: Sandys, writing in 1610 narrates a Persian legend to the effect that Shiraz tobacco was given by a holy man to a virtuous youth, disconsolate at the loss of his loving wife. "Go to thy wife's tomb," said the anchorite, "and there thou wilt find a weed. Pluck it, place it in a reed, and inhale the smoke, as you put fire to it. This will be to you wife, mother, father and brother," continued the holy man, in Homeric strain, "and above all, will be a wise counsellor, and teach thy soul wisdom and thy spirit joy."] "The hookah of India is the most splendid and glittering of all pipes; it is a large affair, on account of the arrangements for causing the smoke to pass through water before it reaches the lips of the smoker, as a means of rendering it cooler and of extracting from it much of its rank and disagreeable flavor. "On the top of an air-tight vessel, half filled with water, is a bowl containing tobacco; a small tube descends from the bowl into the water, and a flexible pipe, one end of which is between the lips of the smoker, is inserted at the other end into the vessel, above the level of the water. Such being the adjustment, the philosophy of the inhalation may be easily understood. The smoker sucks the air out of the vessel, and makes a partial vacuum; the external air, pressing on the burning tobacco, drives the smoke through the small tube into the water beneath; purified from some of its rank qualities, the smoke bubbles up into the vacant part of the vessel above the water, and passes through the flexible pipe to the smoker's mouth. Sometimes the affair is made still more luxurious by substituting rose-water for water _pur et simple_. The tube is so long and flexible that the smoker may sit (or squat) at a small or great distance from the vessel containing the water. In the courts of princes and wealthy natives the vessels and tubes are lavishly adorned with precious metals. One mode of showing hospitality in the East is to place a hookah in the center of the apartment, range the guests around, and let all have a whiff of the pipe in turn; but in more luxurious establishments a separate hookah is placed before each guest. Some of the Egyptians use a form of hookah called the