“O dreams of day and night! O monstrous forms! O effigies of pain! O spectres busy in a cold, cold gloom! O lank-eared Phantoms of black weeded pools!” The “dream fugue” of the author of the “confessions” is a day dream—a splendid one—but the type of many another dream, perhaps, that had coursed through the mind of its writer while under the influence of the subtle drug. One might almost venture the assertion that none but the “opium-eater” could have conceived and written that “fugue.” But “shadows avaunt,” we have stern realities yet from the Pandemonium of opium. The mind suffers and it re-acts upon the body. Although pictures of both the mental and bodily afflictions of indulgers in opium are likely to be gazed upon with somewhat of scepticism, and justly too, in these times of prejudice and outcry against opium trading, yet the stubborn fact stares the scepticism out of countenance, in many of the details of the excesses of the victims of the insinuating poppy juice. Some of these facts come to us with so high an authority and are so often repeated, that the eye and ear refuse to close and be blind and deaf to the pains which succeed the pleasures of opium. A young eagle said to a thoughtful and very studious owl, “It is said there is a bird called Merops, which, when it rises into the air, flies with the tail first and the head looking down to the earth. Is it a fact?” “By no means” (said the owl), “it is only a silly fiction of mankind. Man himself is the Merops, for he would willingly soar to heaven, without losing sight of the world for a single instant.” Dr. Medhurst thus describes the opium-smoker of China:——“The outward appearances are sallowness of the complexion, bloodless cheeks and lips, sunken eye, with a dark circle round the eyelids, and altogether a haggard countenance. There is a peculiar appearance of the face of a smoker not noticed in any other condition; the skin assumes a pale waxy appearance, as if all the fat were removed from beneath the skin. The hollows of the countenance, the eyelids, fissure and corners of the lips, depression at the angle of the jaw, temples, &c., take on a peculiar dark appearance, not like that resulting from various chronic diseases, but as if some dark matter were deposited beneath the skin. There is also a fulness and protrusion of the lips, arising perhaps from the continued use of the large mouth-piece peculiar to the opium-pipe. In fine, a confirmed opium-smoker presents a most melancholy appearance, haggard, dejected, with a lack-lustre eye, and a slovenly, weakly, and feeble gait.”