The suggestion that I could “stop anything,” combined with my own desire, was potent. There was another way in which the insidious poisoning also worked: I became so “interesting,” and entertained the old doctor so successfully, that he found himself able to do without his own dose. The stern injunction “_nur ausnahmsweise_” was forgotten. Without the stuff in my blood I was gloomy, stupid, dull; with it, I became alive and helped him. But the headache and depression, the nausea, the black ultimate dejection of the “day after” could be removed by one thing only. Nothing else had the slightest effect, and only another dose could banish these after-effects--a stronger dose. While the old man was soon able to reduce not only the quantity he took, but the number of injections as well, my own dose, to produce the desired effect, had to be doubled. Every night for four weeks that needle pricked me. In my next incarnation--if it takes place--I shall still see the German doctor slouching across the room at me with the loaded syringe in his poised hand, and the strange look in his eyes. It seems an ineradicable memory.... By the end of the four weeks, I was working again on the newspaper; my visits to the wooden house I cut down to two a week, then one a week. It was a poignant business. He needed me. Desire for the “balm that assuaged,” desire to help the friend who was slowly dying, desire to save myself from obvious destruction, these tugged and tore me different ways. For the full story I should have to write another book.... Three things saved me, I think--in the order of their value: my books and beliefs; Nature--my Sundays in Bronx Park or the woods of the Palisades in New Jersey; and, lastly, the power of the doctor’s own suggestion, “_you_ could stop anything!”... When May came, with her wonder and her magic, I was free again, so free that I could play the fiddle and talk to the old man by the hour, and feel even no desire for the drug. Nor has the desire ever returned to me from that day to this. An experiment with haschisch, a good deal later, an account of which I wrote for my paper at the time, had no “desire” in it. Foolish and dangerous though the experiment was, of course, the _cannabis indica_ was not taken for indulgence, nor to bring a false temporary happiness into a life I loathed. I did it to earn a little extra money; Kay did it with me; three times in all we took it. Some of the effects I tried to describe years later in the first story of a book, “John Silence.” My decision, with the steps I had taken, to arrest Boyde, I told to the doctor on the afternoon following the discovery of his treachery with my letters. He approved. This time even his Jekyll personality approved.