Since De Quincey gave to the world his famous "Confessions," people have been content to regard opium-eating as a strangely fascinating or as a strangely horrible vice. England, and, as I have recently learned, in this country also. It should be well understood that no man _continues_ an opium-eater from choice; he sooner or later becomes the veriest slave; and it is the object of this paper, originally intended for a friend's hand only, to deter intending neophytes--to warn them from submitting themselves to a yoke which will bow them to the earth. In the hope that it may subserve the good proposed, I venture to give a short account of the experiences of one who still feels in his tissues the yet slowly-smouldering fire of the furnace through which he has passed. I first took opium, in the form of laudanum, nearly ten years ago, for insomnia, or sleeplessness, brought on by overwork at a European university. It seemed as if my tissues lapped up the drug and revelled in the new and strange delight which had opened up to them. All that winter I took doses of from ten to thirty drops every Friday night, there being but few classes on Saturday of any consequence, so that I had the full, uninterrupted effect of the drug. Then I could set to work with unparalleled energy. Thought upon thought flowed to me in never-ending waves. I had a mad striving after intellectual distinction, and felt I would pay any price for it. I generally felt, on the Sunday, my lids slightly heavy, but with a sense pervading me of one who had been taking champagne. I never, however, during this whole winter, took more than one dose a week, varying from thirty to sixty drops. Toward the close of the session I one day deferred the dose till Sunday evening. On the Monday following, in the afternoon, I was in one of the class-rooms listening to the lecturer on Belles-lettres and Rhetoric. One hundred and more young men sat, on that Monday afternoon, listening to his silvery voice as he read extracts from Falconer's "Shipwreck," while the splendid conceptions of the poem, and the opium to boot, taken on the Sunday evening before, were all doing their work on an imaginative young man of nineteen. My blood seemed to make music in my vessels as it seemed to come more highly oxygenized singing to my brain, and tingled fresher and warmer into the capillaries of the entire surface, leaping and bubbling like a mountain-brook after a shower. I knew not at first what it could be, but I felt as if I could have bounded to the desk and taken the place of the professor. For a while, I say, I could not realize the cause. At last, as with a lightning flash, it came. Yes! It was the opium.