An Englishman awaking one morning finds himself at Hong-Kong, in the midst of opium and opium-smokers. He is astonished that the Chinaman loves opium as he loves nothing else; he cannot think why his vitiated taste had not settled upon something nobler, why he does not take a fancy to British Brandy? But no! he loves opium. And a Parsee takes him to see the lions, and is so civil as to convey the stranger into his warehouse and open two chests of opium, that he may see the drug as it passes into commerce. Of these, the first consisted of balls, which he describes as of the size of a large apple dumpling, and when cut open the mass is found to be solid. The other was full of objects which a commander in the navy ordered his men to return to the owners of a captured junk, “Ar’nt you ashamed, my lads, to loot a lot of miserable Dutch cheeses?” The “Dutch cheeses” were Patna opium, worth about £5 each. Globes of thick dark jelly enclosed in a crust not unlike the rind of a cheese. The Parsee tapped one with a fragment of an iron fastening of a chest, and drew forth about a spoonful of the drug. It was not the opium which engaged the traveller’s attention, it was the effect it produced upon the surrounding coolies. He had never before seen excitement in a Chinaman’s face. He had seen them tried for their lives, and condemned to death. He had seen them test the long-suffering patience of Mr. Tudor Davies in the Hong-Kong police court, where that gentleman was daily engaged in laborious endeavours to extract truth out of conflicting lies. He had seen them laugh heartily at a gesture at a sing-song; and he once saw a witness grin with great delight, as he unexpectedly saw his most intimate friend, a tradesman of reputed wealth, among a crowd of prisoners in the dock. But these coolies, when they saw that opium opened their horizontal, slit-shaped eyes, till they grew round and starting, their limbs, so lax and limpid, when not in actual strain of labour, were stiff from excitement, every head was pressed forward, every hand seemed ready to clutch. There was a possibility that it would be put down upon the window-sill, near which the stranger and his Parsee friend were standing—and there could be seen the shadow of fingers ready to slide in. It was almost certain that it would be thrown aside—and there was the grand hope of an opium debauch gratis, and this was the state of mind that hope created. And oh what raptures, what delights, what dreams! Already, in imagination, they revelled in scenes such as the wakeful eye of mortal man ne’er saw, and such as never did the mind of man conceive. “A paradise of vaulted bowers Lit by downward gazing flowers, And watery paths that wind between Wildernesses calm and green, Peopled by shapes too bright to see And rest, having beheld; somewhat like thee Which walk upon the sea, and chaunt melodiously.”