As time advances, however, the duration of these periods is found to become shorter, and it is necessary, in order to obtain the same pleasant result, to increase the amount of the drug. It has, also, to be taken oftener. Sleep, when it comes, is less profound, the dreams not so pleasant. Should the patient pass the accustomed time for the drug, the loss is at once felt and the first symptoms of rebellion show themselves. A further and larger dose is taken, to quiet the rebellious demon that rules them, and again comes the pleasure, though not so satisfying as at first. The hours of freedom from the tyrant become shorter and shorter, sleep refuses to come, grave doubts fill the mind, the temper is no longer even and pleasant, but irritable and capricious, pains show themselves in various parts of the body, the nights are long hours of torment, conversation becomes a burden, suspicion shows itself, a desire to be alone is overpowering, better feelings are blunted, benevolence is replaced by selfishness, mental stimulation and exhilarance by torpor. Friends are neglected, the books that were once interesting are no longer so, amusements pall upon the taste, family ties, once so pleasant, are become burdensome, and life a dreary space, marked only by the hour at which the drug is to be taken. The days are filled with repentance, the hours garnished with resolves no sooner made than broken, “O woeful impotence of weak resolve,” the nights years of misery and anguish, teeming with horrors beyond the power of tongue or pen to paint. Here is the plaint of one, now freed from his bondage:[7] “The morphia victim dwells, after the first exhilaration is gone, in a realm of phantoms and shadows. I saw sights more terrible than can be imagined. I felt pains that do not belong to any mortal lesion. I have shrieked my terror, but the shriek only awoke a myriad of devils, who had been sleeping till then unseen by me. Four months of morphia addiction sufficed to bring me to this land of horrors, where no joy came or has come since the making of the world. My days were spent in self-indulgences. Alone in my office, in an easy chair, I could, with poetry and interesting therapeutical works, manage quite comfortably to pass the hours away. But let a patient summon me away from home, and my gloom and despondency was almost insupportable. I was tormented by continual self-conflict. Conscious of the weakness of my efforts to emancipate myself, I kept on planning some new mode of attack, in the nerveless hope that I could defeat the Lethean devil whose thews were strong as steel, and yet I knew, as day followed day, and week followed week, in so far as all this mental warfare was concerned, it could bring me no help in my awful bondage.