ot made clear to me
yet."

"What is the point?"

"I don't understand the effect of the laudanum on me. I don't understand
my walking down-stairs, and along corridors, and my opening and shutting
the drawers of a cabinet, and my going back again to my own room. All
these are active proceedings. I thought the influence of opium was first
to stupefy you, and then to send you to sleep."

"The common error about opium, Mr. Blake! I am, at this moment, exerting
my intelligence (such as it is) in your service, under the influence
of a dose of laudanum, some ten times larger than the dose Mr. Candy
administered to you. But don't trust to my authority--even on a question
which comes within my own personal experience. I anticipated the
objection you have just made: and I have again provided myself with
independent testimony which will carry its due weight with it in your
own mind, and in the minds of your friends."

He handed me the second of the two books which he had by him on the
table.

"There," he said, "are the far-famed CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM
EATER! Take the book away with you, and read it. At the passage which
I have marked, you will find that when De Quincey had committed what he
calls 'a debauch of opium,' he either went to the gallery at the Opera
to enjoy the music, or he wandered about the London markets on Saturday
night, and interested himself in observing all the little shifts and
bargainings of the poor in providing their Sunday's dinner. So much for
the capacity of a man to occupy himself actively, and to move about from
place to place under the influence of opium."

"I am answered so far," I said; "but I am not answered yet as to the
effect produced by the opium on myself."

"I will try to answer you in a few words," said Ezra Jennings.
"The action of opium is comprised, in the majority of cases, in two
influences--a stimulating influence first, and a sedative influence
afterwards. Under the stimulating influence, the latest and most vivid
impressions left on your mind--namely, the impressions relating to the
Diamond--would be likely, in your morbidly sensitive nervous condition,
to become intensified in your brain, and would subordinate to themselves
your judgment and your will exactly as an ordinary dream subordinates to
itself your judgment and your will. Little by little, under this action,
any apprehensions about the safety of the Diamond which you might have
felt during the day would be