"No," he replied, "this is our slack time, as it is still early in the afternoon. We shall have to wait till night falls before our regular customers will begin to drop in, and then we shall be busy until the small hours of the morning. You know," he continued, "that the ideal time for the opium smoker is the night time, when the duties of the day are over, and when, free from care or anxiety of any kind, he may dream and while away the hours under the soothing influence of the pipe." "How is it, then, that these three have come so much earlier in the day than is the custom with opium smokers?" we ask him. "Oh! these are exceptionally hard smokers," he replies, "and so they cannot wait for the usual evening hours when the others assemble to allay the craving that comes upon them. Look at that young fellow over there, with what feverish eagerness he is filling his pipe and taking in long draughts of the opium. When he came in just now he appeared to be wild with pain and every bone throbbed with agony, and every joint seemed as if it would dissolve amidst intolerable suffering. "The man on the next bench to him is one of the heaviest smokers in the town, and can take as much as would poison two or three beginners. He has smoked over thirty years, and now he seems to have lost all will of his own, and all ambition for anything, excepting the one passionate desire to get the opium when the craving creeps into his bones. At one time he was fairly well to do, but now he is a poor man. Everything he possessed was gradually disposed of to get him his daily amount of opium. His business of course was neglected and failed to support the family. By and by he had to sell his little son to get money to satisfy his craving, and when that was spent he disposed of his wife, and now the child is in one part of the town and his mother in another; and a happy release it was for them both," he added with a grim smile, "for the man is hopeless and could never have supported them. "Opium," he continued as he fixed his lacklustre eyes upon me, "is an imperious master and treats its subjects like slaves. It first of all comes with gentle touch as though it were full of the tenderest love for man. Then in a few weeks, when it has got its grip upon the man, it shows itself to be the cruelest taskmaster that ever drove men to a lingering death. It knows that no one in the world can allay the intolerable craving that comes over a man's life but itself, and as though it were playing with a man's soul, it demands that before relief is given the dose must be increased. It has no pity or remorse. It will see the home wretched and the girls sold into slavery, and the boys calling another man father, and the wife in the home of a stranger, rather than remit a single pain or give one hour's release from the agony with which the opium tortures both body and soul.