patient industry he might, by means of it, win more than he had
lost.

Could he do this? The Sunday he had just spent with his family had
awakened him as never before to a sense of his bondage. Even with
the society of those he loved to enliven and sustain he had felt
that he could not get through the day without the help of the
stimulant upon which he had grown so dependent. While at church
it was not the clergyman's voice he heard, but a low yet imperious
and incessant cry for opium. As he rode home, smiling upon his wife
and children, and looking at the beautiful and diversified country,
between them and the landscape he ever saw a little brass instrument
gauged at four or five times the amount that the physician had
at first inserted in his arm. At the dinner table he had spoken
courteously and well on many subjects, and yet ever uppermost in
his mind was one constant thought--opium. The little diabolical
thing itself seemed alive in his pocket, and made its faint yet
potent solicitation against his heart. At last he had muttered, "I
will just take a little of the cursed stuff, and then I must begin
to break myself in dead earnest."

The reader knows what followed. Moreover, he was led to fear that
the alternations of mood caused by injections of morphia would be
so great that they could not fail to excite remark. Although the
new day brought every motive which can influence a man, Mr. Jocelyn
found the path to freedom so steep and difficult that the ascent
seemed well-nigh impossible. His muscles were relaxed, his whole
frame so weary and limp that he even dreaded the effort required
to return to the house where his family was waiting for him. But
the physical oppression was nothing to that which weighed upon his