journey of discovery into Dreamland--a country that no explorations can
exhaust, where beggars are the equals of kings, and where the Fates that
control our actions are touched with a fine eccentricity that in a more
commonplace world would be termed madness. But there nothing is
commonplace."

"You are going to smoke opium?" said Ducie, interrogatively.

"I am going to smoke drashkil. Let me, for this once, persuade you to
follow my example."

"For this once I would rather be excused," said Ducie, laughingly.

Platzoff shrugged his shoulders. "I offer to open for you the golden
gates of a land full of more strange and wondrous things than were ever
dreamed of by any early voyager as being in that new world on whose
discovery he was bent; I offer to open up for you a set of experiences
so utterly fresh and startling that your matter-of-fact English
intellect cannot even conceive of such things. I offer you all this, and
you laugh me down with an air of superiority, as though I were about to
present you with something which, however precious it might be in my
eyes, in yours was utterly without value."

"If I sin at all," said Ducie, "it is through ignorance. The subject is
one respecting which I know next to nothing. But I must confess that
about experiences such as you speak of there is an intangibility--a
want of substance--that to me would make them seem singularly
valueless."

"And is not the thing we call life one tissue of intangibilities?" asked