hours. For ten minutes after waking I never stirred a limb or muscle, fearing it would bring back the pains. But a happier man never woke from sleep. I saw that I was delivered from the prison-house of death. I telegraphed to my family that sleep had come. To my dying-hour I shall ever remember that eventful day. But it was only the glimmering of light. Gradually and slowly sleep came to be my companion again. And even yet it has not fully come. Until within the last twenty days when I awoke, every nerve, every emotion was awake all at once.

It is now the tenth month since I quit morphine. Then my weight was only one hundred and twenty-five pounds. Now it is one hundred and ninety. I am the happiest man on the earth, I am redeemed from one of the lowest hells in all worlds.

In a subsequent letter to Dr. Barnes the writer says: "My health still improves. There is one peculiarity about my will-power; it is so vacillating, not reliable and firm as before. Still I feel that it will come back."

The following declaration, which Dr. Barnes embodies in his article, is deserving the careful consideration both of physicians and philanthropists. He says: "Calling to mind what has come to my knowledge during a long and extensive medical practice, the conclusion is, that I have known of more deaths from the use of opium, in some of its forms, than from all the forms of alcoholic drinks."

A MORPHINE HABIT OVERCOME.

THE following record of a successful endeavor to overcome a morphine habit of several years' growth is abbreviated, by permission of the publishers, from Lippincott's Magazine for April, 1868. The absence of the writer in Europe precludes any more definite statement than can be inferred from the narrative itself as to the length of time during which the habit remained uninterrupted. This is a matter of regret, as the time-element, in the view of the compiler, enters so largely into the question of the probable recovery of an opium sufferer. Morphine appears certainly to have been taken daily in very large quantities for at least five years after the writer's habit became established.

Since De Quincey gave to the world his famous "Confessions," people have been content to regard opium-eating as a strangely fascinating or as a strangely horrible vice. Now it is notorious that this practice is on the increase in England, and, as I have recently learned, in this country also. It should be well understood that no man continues an opiumeater from choice: he sooner or later becomes the veriest slave; and it is the object of this paper, originally intended for a friend's hand only, to deter intending neophytes—to warn them from submitting themselves to a yoke which will bow them to the earth. In the hope that it may subserve the good proposed, I venture to give a short account of the

experiences of one who still feels in his tissues the yet slowlysmouldering fire of the furnace through which he has passed. I first took opium, in the form of laudanum, nearly ten years ago, for insomnia, or sleeplessness, brought on by overwork at a European university. It seemed as if my tissues lapped up the drug and revelled in the new and strange delight which had opened up to them. All that winter I took doses of from ten to thirty drops every Friday night, there being but few classes on Saturday of any consequence, so that I had the full, uninterrupted effect of the drug. Then I could set to work with unparalleled energy. Thought upon thought flowed to me in never-ending waves. I had a mad striving after intellectual distinction, and felt I would pay any price. for it. I generally felt, on the Sunday, my lids slightly heavy, but with a sense pervading me of one who had been taking champagne. I never, however, during this whole winter, took more than one dose a week, varying from thirty to sixty drops. Toward the close of the session I one day deferred the dose till Sunday evening. On the Monday following, in the afternoon, I was in one of the class-rooms listening to the lecturer on Belles-lettres and Rhetoric. hundred and more young men sat, on that Monday afternoon, listening to his silvery voice as he read extracts from Falconer's "Shipwreck," while the splendid conceptions of the poem, and the opium to boot, taken on the Sunday evening before, were all doing their work on an imaginative young man of nineteen. My blood seemed to make music in my vessels as it seemed to come more highly oxygenized singing to my brain, and tingled fresher and warmer into the capillaries of the entire surface, leaping and bubbling like a mountain-brook after a shower. I knew not at first what it could be, but I felt as if I could have bounded to the desk and taken the place of the professor. For a while, I say, I

One

could not realize the cause.

At last, as with a lightning

flash, it came. Yes! It was the opium.

And at that moment, then and there was signed the bond which was destined to go far to wither all my fairest hopes ; to undermine, while seeming to build up, my highest aspirations; to bring disunion between me and those near and dear to me; to frustrate all my plans, and, while “keeping the word of promise to the ear," ever breaking it to my hope. As I trace these very characters, I am suffering from the remote consequences, in a moral point of view, of having set my hand and seal to that bond.

For two years longer that I remained at college I continued to take laudanum three times a week, and I could, at the end of this period, take two drachms (120 drops) at each dose. All this time my appetite, though not actually destroyed, as it now is, was capricious in the extreme, though I did not lose flesh, at least not markedly so. On the other hand, my capability for mental exertion all through this period was something incredible; and let me say here that one of the most fascinating effects of the drug in the case of an intellectual and educated man is the sense it imparts of what might be termed intellectual daring: add to this the endowments of a strong frame, high animal spirits, and on such an one, opium is the ladder that seems to lead to the gates of heaven. But alas for him when at its topmost rung! After obtaining my degree I gradually eased off the use of the drug for about three months with but little trouble. I was waiting for an appointment in India. At the end of the period named I sailed for my destination, and had almost forgotten the taste of opium; but I found that I was only respited, not redeemed. Two months after I had entered upon my duties, and found myself quietly among my books, the bond was renewed. After two months, in which I passed

from laudanum to crude opium, I finally settled on the alkaloid morphia, as being the most powerful of all the preparations of opium. I began with half a grain twice a day, and for the six months ending the last day of September of the just expired year, my daily quantum was sixty grains-half taken the instant I awoke, the other half at six o'clock in the evening; and I could no more have avoided putting into my body this daily supply than I could have walked over a burning ploughshare without scorching my feet.

For the first year, five grains, or even two and a half, would suffice for a couple of days; that is to say, there was no craving of the system for it during its deprivation for this space. At the end of this period there would be a sense of depression amounting to little beyond uneasiness. But soon four hours' deprivation of the drug gave rise to a physical and mental prostration that no pen can adequately depict, no language convey: a horror unspeakable, a woe unutterable takes possession of the entire being; a clammy perspiration bedews the surface, the eye is stony and hard, the noise pointed, as in the hippocratic face preceding dissolution, the hands uncertain, the mind restless, the heart as ashes, the "bones marrowless."

To the opium-consumer, when deprived of this stimulant, there is nothing that life can bestow, not a blessing that man can receive, which would not come to him unheeded, undesired, and be a curse to him. There is but one all-absorbing want, one engrossing desire—his whole being has but one tongue-that tongue syllables but one word-morphia. And oh! the vain, vain attempt to break this bondage, the labor worse than useless-a minnow struggling to break the toils that bind a Triton!

I pass over all the horrible physical accompaniments that accumulate after some hours' deprivation of the drug when it