which was near him. He wound the dipper round and round until the
opium was roasted and had a brown colour. He then thrust the end of
the dipper with the prepared drug into the opening of the pipe, which
was somewhat after the Turkish style with its long stem. He next held
the bowl of the pipe over the lamp until the opium frizzled. Then
putting the stem of the pipe in his mouth he inhaled the smoke, and
almost immediately exhaled it through the mouth and nostrils. While
smoking he removed the opium, going through the same process as
before, and it all took about fifteen minutes. What the old man's
feelings were he did not tell us, but he seemed very contented, as if
then he cared for nothing, as if he had no concern for the world and
its trials. But one must read the graphic pages of Thomas De Quincey
in his "Confessions of an English Opium Eater," in order to know what
are the joys and what the torments of him who is addicted to the use
of the pernicious drug. It was while De Quincey was in Oxford that he
came under its tyranny. At first taken to allay neuralgic pain, and
then resorted to as a remedy on all occasions of even the slightest
suffering, it wove its chain around him like a merciless master who
puts his servant in bonds. But though given to its use all his life
afterwards, in later years he took it moderately. Still he was its
slave. A man of marvellous genius, a master of the English tongue,
he had not full mastery of his own appetite; and one of such talent,
bound Andromeda-like to the rock of his vice, ready to be devoured
in the sea of his perplexity by what is worse than the dragon of the
story, he deserves our pity, nay, even our tears. He tells us how
he was troubled with tumultuous dreams and visions, how he was a
participant in battles, strifes; and how agonies seized his soul, and
sudden alarms came upon him, and tempests, and light and darkness;
how he saw forms of loved ones who vanished in a moment; how he heard
"everlasting farewells;" and sighs as if wrung from the caves of hell