nearly the same properties as the camphor, and is supposed to be the first stage of its formation. Some eight China catties (eleven pounds) of this oil may be obtained from a medium-sized tree, which, after having been cut off for the purpose of abstracting the oil, will, if left standing for a few years, produce abundantly an inferior article of camphor. In British India we saw whole fields of the opium poppy, stately, beautiful plants four or five feet high, the stem of a sea-green color, round, erect and smooth, and the gay blooms of ripe crimson hue. The plant is an annual, the seed being sown in autumn and the crop gathered in August. After the flowers have fallen circular incisions are made close around the capsules of the plant, and from these wounds exudes a white, milky juice, that is afterward concreted by the heat of the sun into dark-brown masses. These constitute the opium of commerce in its crude state; but to prepare it for smoking the Chinese take it through quite a complicated process, boiling, purifying and condensing till it assumes the appearance of a thick gelatinous paste of a purplish-black color. The habit of opium-smoking is unquestionably the direst curse under which vast, populous China groans. One who has never visited an opium shop can have no conception of the fatal fascination that holds its victims fast bound--mind, heart, soul and conscience, all absolutely dead to every impulse but the insatiable, ever-increasing thirst for the damning poison. I entered one of these dens but once, but I can never forget the terrible sights and sounds of that "place of torment." The apartment was spacious, and might have been pleasant but for its foul odors and still fouler scenes of unutterable woe--the footprints of sin trodden deep in the furrows of those haggard faces and emaciated forms. On all four sides of the room were couches placed thickly against the walls, and others were scattered over the apartment wherever there was room for them. On each of these lay extended the wreck of what was once a man. Some few were old--all were hollow-eyed, with sunken cheeks and cadaverous countenances; many were clothed in rags, having probably smoked away their last dollar; while others were offering to pawn their only decent garment for an additional dose of the deadly drug. A decrepit old man raised himself as we entered, drew a long sigh, and then with a half-uttered imprecation on his own folly proceeded to refill his pipe. This he did by scraping off, with a five-inch steel needle, some opium from the lid of a tiny shell box, rolling the paste into a pill, and then, after heating it in the blaze of a lamp, depositing it within the small aperture of his pipe. Several short whiffs followed; then the smoker would remove the pipe from his mouth and lie back motionless; then replace the pipe, and with fast-glazing eyes blow the smoke slowly through his pallid nostrils. As the narcotic effects of the