Another personal experience may serve to dispel the popular delusion that opium is necessarily or generally a stupefying agent. A mismanaged minor operation exposed two sensitive nerves, producing an intolerable hyperæsthesia and a nervous terror which rendered surgical relief for the time impossible, and endurance utterly beyond human power. For a fortnight or more the patient was never free from agony save when the nerves of sensation were practically paralysed by opium. During that fortnight he took up for the first time, and thoroughly mastered, as a college examination shortly afterwards proved, Mill’s _Principles of Political Economy_, a work not merely taxing to the uttermost the natural faculties of nineteen, but demanding beyond any other steady persistent coherence and lucidity of thought. The patient affirmed that never had his mind been clearer, his power of concentration greater, his receptive faculties more perfect or his memory more tenacious. That the drug had in no wise impaired the intellectual, however it might have quelled the muscular or nervous energies, seems obvious. Yet at that time the patient was ignorant of the two antidotes above mentioned; and neither coffee nor aperient medicine qualified or mitigated the influence of the opiates; an influence strong enough to quell for some twenty-two hours out of the twenty-four an acute and terrible nervous torture. After the use of a fortnight or a month—especially when used legitimately to relieve pain and not to procure pleasure—the entire abandonment of opium may be easily accomplished in the course of two or three days. The pain or the disease it is used to overcome carries off, so to speak, or diverts in great measure the injurious influence of the drug; as a person suffering from diarrhœa, snakebite, or other cause of intense lowering of physical and nervous power, may take with impunity a dose of brandy which in health would certainly intoxicate him. But after six months’ or a year’s daily use or abuse, only the strongest and sternest resolution can overcome or shake off the tyranny of opium, and then only at a price of suffering and misery, of physical and mental torture such as only those who have known it can conceive.