or
causes, it is well in the hour of ease to learn beforehand the risks
which come of too easy and too frequent appeals to agents which benumb
the nerves.

When people are first given opium, it is apt to be the friend of the
night and the foe of the morrow. Repeated often enough, it loses power
to constipate and distress. It still soothes pain. It still gives sleep.
At last it seems to be in a measure a tonic for those who take it. But
after a while it does some other things less agreeable. The mind and
memory suffer, but far more surely the moral nature is altered. The
woman becomes indifferent, her affections dull, her sense of duty
hopelessly weakened. Watchful, cunning, suspicious, deceitful,--a thief,
if need be, to get the valued opiate,--she stops at nothing. It would
seem as if it were a drug which directly affected the conscience. At
last, before this one craving, all ties in life are slight and bind her
not. Insensible to shame and dead to affection, she is happy if the
alcohol habit be not added to her disorder, for if she cannot get the
one drug she longs for, the other will serve her at need.

There is a popular idea that opium gives pleasant dreams, and that it
takes us away into the land of poetry, to which it is supposed to have
conducted Coleridge and De Quincey. As a matter of fact, there are but
few persons who get more out of opium than relief of pain, sense of
comfort, and next day's remorses. The opium dream is not for all. I have
known only four or five cases of habitual and distinct opium dreamers.
There was more of Coleridge than of opium in "Kubla Khan," and more of
De Quincey than of the juice of poppies in the "Vision of Sudden Death."
When it came to the telling of these immortal dreams, we may well
suspect that the narrative gained in the literary appeal from the poet
opium-drunk to the poet sober.

It is, I fancy, well known to physicians that opium may act on an
individual differently at different times. In the case of one well known
to me it usually causes sleep, and no longer gives rise to nausea the
next day, as it once did. Although it leaves him sufficiently wretched,
and he has taken it but rarely, the drug occasionally keeps him wide
awake and delightfully indifferent to the passage of time. The striking
hours are heard, and that is all. There is none of the ennui of
insomnia. This effect of morphia is rare with him. He may have taken
morphia a dozen times in his life to ease a