diminished use of opium, had now induced a furious appetite. Dining
early at a restaurant of rather a superior character, where bread,
crackers, pickles, etc., were kept on the table in much larger
quantities than it was supposed possible for one individual to need,
my hunger had become so extreme that I consumed not only all for which
I had specially called, but usually every thing else upon the table,
leaving little for the waiter to remove except empty dishes and his
own very apparent astonishment. This, it should be understood, was a
surreptitious meal, as my own dinner-hour was four o'clock, at which
time I was as ready to do it justice as though innocent of all food
since a heavy breakfast. The hours intervening between this first and
second dinner it was difficult to pass away. The ability to read even
a newspaper paragraph had ceased for a number of days. From habit,
indeed, I continued daily to wander into several of the city
book-stores and into the public library, but the only use I was able
to make of their facilities consisted in sitting, but with frequent
change of chairs, and looking listlessly around me. The one prevailing
feeling now was to get through, somehow or anyhow, the experiment I
was suffering under.

Early in the trial my misgivings as to the result had been frequent;
but after the struggle had become thoroughly an earnest one, a kind of
cast-iron determination made me sure of a final triumph. The more the
agony of pain seemed intolerable, the more seemed to deepen the
certainty of my conviction that I should conquer. I thought at times
that I could not survive such wretchedness, but no other alternative
for many days presented itself to my mind but that of leaving off
opium or dying. I recall, indeed, a momentary exception, but the
relaxed resolution lasted only as the lightning-flash lasts, though
like the lightning it irradiated for a brilliant instant the tumult