drug; had inherited a sound constitution, and differed from any other
fresh subject only in the intensity of his nervous temperament. I wish
to emphasize the fact that the system of a mere neophyte, with nothing
to neutralize the effects of the drug save the absorbency, so to
speak, of the pain for which it was given, could so rapidly adapt
itself to them as to demand an increase of the dose in such an
alarming ratio. There are certain men to whom opium is as fire to
tow, and my friend was one of these. On the first of October he
sensibly perceived the trifling dose of fifty drops; on the first of
November he was taking, without increased sensation, an ounce vial of
"M'Munn" daily.
From that time--totally ignorant of the terrible trap which lay
grinning under the bait he dabbled with--he continued to take opium at
short intervals for several years. When by the physician's orders he
abandoned "M'Munn," on the subsidence of the eye-difficulty, his
symptoms were uneasy rather than distressing, and disappeared after a
few days' oppression at the pit of the stomach and a few nights'
troubled dreaming. But he had not forgotten the sweet dissolving views
at midnight, the great executive achievements at noonday, the heavenly
sense of a self-reliance which dare go anywhere, say any thing,
attempt any thing in the world. He had not forgotten the nonchalance
under slight, the serenity in pain, the apathy to sorrow, which for
one month set him calm as Boodh in the temple-splendors of his
darkened room. He had not forgotten that the only perfect
_peace_ he had ever experienced was there, and he remembered that
peace as something which seemed to blend all the assuaged passion and
confirmed dignity of old age with that energy of high emprise which
thrills the nerves of manhood. He had tasted as many sources of
earthly pleasure as any man I ever knew; but the ecstasies of form and
color, wine, Eros, music, perfume, all the luxuries of surrounding
which wealth could purchase or high-breeding appreciate, were as
nothing to him in comparison with the memory of that time on which his
family threw away their sympathy when they called it his "month of
_suffering."_
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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