While this was going on, my host, Mr. Chang, was busily making preparations for my initiatory smoke by sticking small pellets of the opium (a brownish, glue-like substance) upon a pin, and rolling and re-rolling them against the pipe, which is about the size of a small flute, and has a big open bowl with a tiny aperture at the base. Into this aperture the drug-smeared pin is slipped, and the pipe is then held over a lamp, and the fumes of the burning opium inhaled. The occupation is by no means a luxurious one; for, as surely as I removed the pipe from my lips to indulge in a furtive cough (and it did make me cough a bit at first), it inevitably went out. By means of repeated applications to the lamp, however, I managed to get through the allotted number of pipes, and sank slowly and insensibly into the deep waters of slumber, until at last they closed over my head, and I was swept and borne unresistingly away upon the vast seaward setting tide of sleep. Of my dreams, as I have already said, I have but the haziest of recollections. I can just recall a sensation of sailing, as on a cloud, amid regions of blue and buoyant ether; of seeing, through vistas of purple and gold, a scene of sunny seas and shining shores, where, it seemed to me, I beheld the fabled "Blessed Isles," stretching league beyond league afar; and of peeps of paradisial landscapes that swam up to me as through a world of waters, and then softened and sank away into a blending of beauteous colours, and into a vision of white warm arms and wooing bosoms. And so we slept on, I and my wretched companions, until, to quote Rossetti:-- Sleep sank them lower than the tide of dreams, And their dreams watched them sink, and slid away. Slowly their souls swam up again, through gleams Of watered light, and dull drowned waifs of day; Till, from some wonder of new woods and streams, He woke and wondered more. Yes, "I woke and wondered more"--woke to wonder where I was, and where were my boots, my hat, and my umbrella; woke to find the faithless friend, who had promised to guard my slumbers, sleeping peacefully at his post; and woke with a taste in my mouth which can only be likened to a cross between onions and bad tobacco. And this taste, in conjunction with a splitting headache and a general lowness of spirits, served, for the next day or two, to keep me constantly in remembrance of my visit to the Opium Den in Ratcliff Highway. [Illustration] _Janko the Musician._ FROM THE POLISH OF SIENKIEWICZ.