My Library

time, my mind lingered on his concluding words. It was plain and clear, so I thought, that he alluded to certain medicaments which have long been used for the production of a species of ecstatic dream, and so I replied— “ ‘You are doubtless correct, and can, by physical agents, produce strange psychical phenomena, and curious exhibitions of mental activity and fantasy; but, beyond all question, you over-rate their importance and power, for not one of them is adequate to the office of enabling a clear, strong mind to move within the sphere of the Hidden, but the Real.’ “ ‘To what do you allude particularly, mon ami?’ “ ‘I allude to various chemical and botanical compounds; for instance, those plants which furnish a large per centage of the chemical principles Narcotine, Morphia, and others of the same general characteristics, as Opium, Beng, and Hemp, the preparations of the delightful but dangerous ——, the equally fascinating decoctions of ----, not forgetting Hasheesh, that accursed drug, beneath whose sway millions in the Orient have sunk into untimely but rainbowtinted graves, and which, in western lands, has made hundreds of howling maniacs, and transformed scores of strong men into the most loathly, drivelling idiots.’ “We lapsed into silence, which at length was broken by Ravalette, who said, as he clasped my