How exhilarating the primary effects of opium. How easy to chronicle one’s impressions. How I can write! No wonder that De Quincey--; I seem to be in a brighter sphere. It is as though the air of the laboratory had turned to pure oxygen. What strength I feel! What mighty deeds could I not accomplish now? How large and vivid the gas lights are. There is an aureola of secondary glow about each of them. I would experiment with them to-morrow if-- What music is that? Is it not beautiful? Why, I know that air--it is one my mother used to sing when I was a little lad--I remember how my dear little sister used to--But how faint the strains are now. And the lights are growing dim. It will soon be dark. My chair is rocking, too. How soothing and sensuous the motion seems. How drowsy I am getting--I must take that hypodermic before I get too sleepy. There, that shows what will power can do. Some men would have gone to sleep and forgotten the rest of their plans. How orderly and systematic A. is, to be sure. No rummaging around in the drawer amid a confusion of things to find the prussic. How tight the stopper is. There, now I have it. Pshaw! I’ve spilled half of it on the floor and cut my fingers. How clumsy and numb my fingers are, and how hot and fiery this blood is. How delightful the prussic smells. Just a drop--the morphia will combine with it and neutralize it. The drugs will neutralize each other just sufficiently to give me plenty of time, and I shall still be able to write. Here, in my thigh--just here-- Ah! My God! too m--. CHIQUITA I had been rambling about through Calaveras, investigating mining properties, and incidentally enjoying to the full the glorious weather of the early California spring. My search for the pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow had led me far up among the majestic Sierras--those wondrous mountains at the foot of which was verdure more beautiful than any artist could portray, while their snow-covered tops reared themselves proudly through the clouds and, peering beyond, seemed to challenge the very sky to descend and meet them. The ravines and gulches were tortured and torn by rushing torrents from the melting snows above. Every rivulet had become a brook, every brook a river, and every river a veritable Niagara. So replete with the swift rushing yellow waters were the courses of the mountains and valleys, that the venerable wise-acre, yclept “the oldest inhabitant,” was permitted by his neighbors to croak to his heart’s content, and actually held his audiences while he regaled them with the horrors of “the freshet of the spring of ’61 and ’62,” and chilled the very marrow of their bones with the ominous prophecy that the present gorging of the streams was but the forerunner of a rising of the waters which should make the famous old-time flood of the Sacramento Valley fade into nothingness.