In less than a week from the beginning the symptoms indicated a most obstinate chronic gastritis. There was a perpetual sense of corrosion at the pit of the stomach very like that which characterizes the fatal operation of arsenic. There was less action of the liver than usually indicates a salvable case, and no irritation of the lowest intestines. _Pari passu_ with the gastritic suffering, the neuralgic pain spread down the extremities from an apparent centre between the kidneys, through the trunk, from another line near the left margin of the liver, and through the whole medullary substance of the brain itself. Although I was so unfortunate as not to be beside him during this stage, I can still infallibly draw on my whole experience for information regarding the intensity of this pain. _Tic-douloureux_ most nearly resembles it in character. Like that agonizing affection, it has periods of exacerbation; unlike it, it has no intervals of continuous repose. Like _tic-douloureux_, its sensation is a curiously fluctuating one, as if pain had been _fluidized_ and poured in trickling streams through the tubules of nerve tissue which are affected by it; but, unlike that, it affects every tubule in the human body--not a single diseased locality. Charles Reade chaffs the doctors very wittily in "Hard Cash" on their _penchant_ for the word "_hyperaesthesia,"_ but nothing else exactly defines that exaggeration of nervous sensibility which I have invariably seen in opium-eaters. Some of them were hurt by an abrupt slight touch, and cried out at the jar of a heavy footstep like a patient with acute rheumatism. Some developed sensitiveness with the progress of expurgating the poison, until their very hair and nails felt sore, and the whole surface of the skin suffered from cold air or water like the lips of a wound. After all, utterly unable to convey an idea of the _kind_ of suffering, I must content myself by repeating, of its extent, that no prolonged pain of any kind known to science can equal it. The totality of the experience is only conceivable by adding this physical torture to a mental anguish which even the Oriental pencil of De Quincey has but feebly painted; an anguish which slays the will, yet leaves the soul conscious of its murder; which utterly blots out hope, and either paralyzes the reasoning faculties which might suggest encouragements, or deadens the emotional nature to them as thoroughly as if they were not perceived; an anguish, which sometimes includes just, but always a vast amount of _unjust_ self-reproach, winch brings every failure and inconsistency, every misfortune or sin of a man's life as clearly before his face as on the day he was first mortified or degraded by it--before his face, not in one terrible dream, which is once for all over with sunrise, but as haunting ghosts, made out by the feverish eyes of the soul down to the minutest detail of ghastliness, and never