There is no such a thing as temperance in opium as there is in the indulgence of intoxicating liquors. Unless a man is a confirmed drunkard he can abstain for a longer or a shorter time from them without any very serious inconvenience, but such liberty is never accorded to the opium smoker. After a daily use for six months, he may never have a day off, but as the hours pass by he is reminded by the enemy that creeps over him, and that fills him with pains and languor, that he must light his pipe. Sometimes in cases of severe illness his usual dose must be doubled before his torture is relieved, and when it comes to pass that he does not wish to smoke, it is then known that a stronger than opium is going to claim him as its victim. If a man has plenty of means he lays in a supply, and when the time comes round for him to take it, which it does with the inflexibility and cruelty of fate, he reclines on a couch and fills and refills his pipe, and draws in one volume of fume after another until the pains that have gripped every bone in his body loose their hold, and the craving that has brought a shadow over his life, and blotted out sun and moon and stars, and that has shut out of his heart his home and his wife and his children, and has given him a vision only of his own wretched self, slowly disappears, and he finally drops into a childlike sleep. He rises perfectly free from pain or weariness, but he is oppressed with the thought that twice every day he has to go through this terrible experience, and that never as long as he lives will he ever be a free man again. There is a release for every one that desires it; but the price to be paid is so great and the agony to be endured so intolerable that but very few of those upon whom opium has laid its grip would dare to attempt to free himself from its shackles. If the opium smoker is a poor man, then indeed the lot of the home is a miserable one. At all costs he must have his pipe at the regular time, no matter who else may suffer. His wife and children may go without food, but he must be supplied. One article after another is sold to buy the opium, until the house is so bare that there is nothing left to be disposed of. Then one of the children disappears, for a childless man in another part of the city has bought it, and it now belongs to him. One after another vanishes in the same way, till no one is left except his wife. At last when all the funds have gone and there are no more little ones to dispose of, negotiations are entered into with a middle-woman, and his wife too is no longer to be found in her wretched home, for she has become the spouse of another man, and the miserable opium smoker is left alone, content with the thought that for the present, at least, he has got the funds to enable him to satisfy the craving and to keep off the horrors that would make his life one long torture.