Page "belles_lettres" Paragraph 86

I should like, by the way, to make it clear that I am not using the word `` Persians '' carelessly.

I don't mean a few aesthetes who play about with sensations, like a young prince in a miniature dabbling his hand in a pool.

These things are important to almost all Persians and perhaps most important to the most ordinary.

The men crying love poems in an orchard on any summer's night are as often as not the lutihaw, mustachioed toughs who spend most of their lives in and out of the local prisons, brothels, and teahouses.

A few months ago it was a fairly typical landlord who in the dead of night lugged me up a mountainside to drink from a spring famous in the neighborhood for its clarity and flavor.

Not long ago an acquaintance, a slick-headed water rat of a lad up from the maw of the city, stood on the balcony puffing his first cigarette in weeks.

The air, he said, was just right ; ;

a cigarette would taste particularly good.

I really didn't know what he meant.

It was a nice day, granted.

But he knew ; ;

he sniffed the air and licked it on his lip and knew as a vintner knows a vintage.