anxiety I connected with his image for some days) fastened afterwards
upon my dreams, and brought other Malays with him, worse than himself,
that ran "a-muck" {18} at me, and led me into a world of troubles. But
to quit this episode, and to return to my intercalary year of happiness.
I have said already, that on a subject so important to us all as
happiness, we should listen with pleasure to any man's experience or
experiments, even though he were but a plough-boy, who cannot be supposed
to have ploughed very deep into such an intractable soil as that of human
pains and pleasures, or to have conducted his researches upon any very
enlightened principles. But I who have taken happiness both in a solid
and liquid shape, both boiled and unboiled, both East India and
Turkey--who have conducted my experiments upon this interesting subject
with a sort of galvanic battery, and have, for the general benefit of the
world, inoculated myself, as it were, with the poison of 8000 drops of
laudanum per day (just for the same reason as a French surgeon inoculated
himself lately with cancer, an English one twenty years ago with plague,
and a third, I know not of what nation, with hydrophobia), I (it will be
admitted) must surely know what happiness is, if anybody does. And
therefore I will here lay down an analysis of happiness; and as the most
interesting mode of communicating it, I will give it, not didactically,
but wrapped up and involved in a picture of one evening, as I spent every
evening during the intercalary year when laudanum, though taken daily,
was to me no more than the elixir of pleasure. This done, I shall quit
the subject of happiness altogether, and pass to a very different
one--_the pains of opium_.

Let there be a cottage standing in a valley, eighteen miles from any
town--no spacious valley, but about two miles long by three-quarters of a
mile in average width; the benefit of which provision is that all the
family resident within its circuit will compose, as it were, one larger
household, personally familiar to your eye, and more or less interesting
to your affections. Let the mountains be real mountains, between 3,000
and 4,000 feet high, and the cottage a real cottage, not (as a witty
author has it) "a cottage with a double coach-house;" let it be, in fact
(for I must abide by the actual scene), a white cottage, embowered with
flowering shrubs, so chosen as to unfold a succession of flowers upon the
walls and