takes of the spiritual consciousness; it is the shadow of the idea organized in it, which we term Soul, and as a shadow represents the deformities and beauties of the substance casting it. A man can not be better or wiser than what his faculties are equal to so he can not be healthier than his organization allows. But Nature loves health better than disease, and gladly coöperates with any brave attempt to starve out a baleful inheritance. Your footsteps are dogged by some beast of transmission; but are you not throwing it now a bone, now a loaf, in some evil habit, or thoughtless adventure? How much of the evil would be, in a generation or two, at least, sloughed off, if it were solemnly taught in the household that late hours are as bad as profanity; that self-neglect or indulgence, exposure, over-eating and drinking are equally wicked with falsehood and slander! How much would be gained if the waste of life, both to the unhealthy and others around them, could be so represented that a certain stigma and meanness should attach to invalidism! VII. Old Mrs. Influenza Crammit was kept sick twenty years, and every other year brought to death's door by a fault in her Herme neutics. You shall judge. This lady lived in her body as in a cheap summer-house, and one sadly in want of repair, too: it was in a ricketty condition, and would barely have served for a month or two of the year. She lived (?) in it, however, the year round, though the rain came in here and the snow there. The result was, Mrs. C. had a perpetual cold. One day I found the invalid with rations for a regiment before her, and complaining that she had not the appetite to dispose of it. "Good heavens, Madame," I cried, "why should you wish to dispose of that food in your present state?" But, then, I have a dreadful cold!" Alas, are you then become so desperate, my poor friend? Is there no relief but suicide ?" "Suicide!" screamed she; "who said anything about sui cide?" 86 Did you not say you were devouring this mass of food because you had а dreadful cold?" To be sure the rule is (isn't it?), Feed a cold and starve a fever." "Madame, your Hermeneutics are in a most dangerous condi "Your Rules of Interpretation. The Proverb is, Feed a cold and you'll have to starve a fever;' that is, Feed your cold and you raise a fiend from the nethermost Fire, and lucky indeed will you be if you can starve him off your track." "Lord bless me!" cried Mrs. Crammit, "and here I've been stuffing for this cold twenty years! [To be concluded.] PSYCHOLOGY OF OPIUM AND HASHEESH. HASHEESH. IN the sap of Cannabis Indica is found a peculiar resinous substance which is the most powerful of known narcotics,-so powerful that in even northern countries, where the proportion of resin in the plant is so small that it had well nigh escaped observation, one can not long remain in a hemp-field without experiencing that sickening giddiness which leads on to catalepsy as surely as the Mississippi to the sea. The narcotic effects of this plant, which is hasheesh, are similar in many respects to those of opium, but they differ from them very widely in others, the most notable of which is this: while opium lessens the sensibility to external impressions, and creates an inhuman love of solitude, hasheesh immeasurably increases the susceptibility of the senses, so much so that its devotee is made the creature and very slave of impressions from without. All the objects of sensation are endowed with supernatural attributes and proportions. A straw put in the path of one possessed by the fantasia presents an insurmountable obstacle, and the slightest dangers overpower the mind with cowardice. Even the slight noises which one hears at night, occasioned by changes of temperature, in the timbers of the house, are liable to throw the hasheeshin into horrible convulsions of fear. Time and space are magnified into frightful proportions. Minutes become a ons, eternities— one may writhe in Gehenna for ages, or, confined beneath the foundations of the world, hear the solemn tramp of a thousand centuries, and waking, find the second-hand has not travelled once round the dial. The walls of a college dormitory burst asunder, and station themselves at sublime distances, and dome erects itself on dome, until the eye shrinks blinded by infinity. Even the body itself is not exempt from this wonderful expansion. Bayard Taylor, when under the influence of hasheesh, felt that he existed through a vast extent of space.. "The blood," he says, "pulsed from my heart, sped through uncounted leagues before it reached my extremities; the air drawn into my lungs expanded into a sea of limpid ether, and the arch of my skull was broader than the vault of heaven. Within the concave that held my brain were fathomless deeps of blue; clouds floated there, and the winds of heaven rolled them together, and there shone the sun." Then, too, all the operations of the vital organism often become the objects of introverted observation, and all the secret and mysterious economy of animal life is revealed: the blood is followed by an uneludible eye through the very minutest vein and artery, and the victim is painfully conscious of the opening and closing of every valve in his body, while the heart becomes a mighty engine, the roar of whose machinery causes the earth to vibrate. - There is something infinitely ludicrous in many of the freaks which the demon of hasheesh plays with the imagination. Mr. Taylor imagined himself a mass of transparent jelly, which a confectioner was pouring into a twisted mould; he writhed in agonizing contortions in endeavoring to accomplish his gelatinous destiny, and had so far succeeded that only one foot remained outside, when another mould of more crooked and intricate shape was substituted. He was so convulsed with laughter at his own movements that the tears flowed from his eyes in streams, but judge of his amazement, when "every drop that fell immediately became a large loaf of bread, and tumbled on the shop-board of a baker at Damascus." The more he laughed, the faster fell the loaves, until the poor baker seemed to be in imminent peril of his life. At another time Mr. Taylor was standing on the top of the great pyramid of Cheops, when he suddenly discovered that it was not built of limestone, as previous travellers had foolishly supposed, but of huge, square plugs of Cavendish tobacco. A friend of his, who had taken hasheesh at the same time, suddenly sprang to the floor, crying, with a shriek of laughter, "Ye gods! I am a locomotive!" For two or three hours he paced the room with meas ured strides, turning imaginary wheels at his sides, exhaling violent jets of breath, and whenever he spoke, "jerking out his syllables with the disjointed accent peculiar to a steam engine." Being seized with the awful thirst which often accompanies the hasheesh delirium, he raised a pitcher of water to his lips, but Lefore he had taken a mouthful he set it down again, exclaiming in a yell of laughter, "How can I take water into my boiler while I um letting off steam?" That from the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step, has never been so fully illustrated as in the hasheesh fantasia. Indeed, the ludicrous in this madness is only bounded by its unutterable sublimities; and the transitions from grave to gay, from unquenchable burnings in Gehenna to the multitudinous laughters of a Bacchanalian feast, is instantaneous. This is powerfully illustrated by some of the visions of Fitzhugh Ludlow. After wandering down grand arboreal arches, formed of giant cedars of Lebanon, accompanied by snowy-bearded, glorious bards, who sang to the music of lyres of unearthly workmanship,—after being borne aloft upon the glory of their strains, until he floated in a trance among the burning choir of the seraphim, he was suddenly set down in a large apartment resembling the Senate Chamber at Washington, "in the midst of a most witchly congress." On the dais sat an old crone, knit of purple yarn. "In faultless order the stitches ran along her face; in every pucker of her reëntrant mouth, in every wrinkle of her brow, she was a yarny counterfeit of the grandam of actual life; and by some skillful process of stuffing, her nose had received its due peak, and her chin its projection. The occupants of the seats below were all but reproductions of their president, and both she and they were constantly swaying from side to side, forward and back, to the music of some invisible instruments, whose tone and style were most intensely and ludicrously Ethiopian. Not a word was spoken by any of the wooly conclave, but with untiring industry they were all knitting, knitting, knitting, ceaselessly, as if their lives depended on it. . . They were knitting old women like themselves! One of the sisterhood had nearly brought her double to completion; earnestly another was engaged in rounding out an eyeball; another was fastening the gathers at the corners of a mouth; another was setting up the stitches for an old woman in petto. "With marvellous rapidity the work went on; ever and anon some completed crone sprang from the needles which had just achieved her, and, instantly vivified, took up the instruments of reproduction, and fell to work as assiduously as if she had been a member of the congress since the world began." "Here," cried the intruder," here, at last, do I recognize the meaning of endless progression!" The dome echoed with his peals of laughter, but there was 66 no motion of astonishment in the stitches of a single face, as for dear life the manufactured old women went on unobstructed by the involuntary rudeness." The intruder was seized with an irresistible desire "to snatch up a quartette of needles and join the sisterhood;" his nose began to ruffle with stitches, and the next moment, he says, would have seen him a partner in their yarny destinies but for a hand that pulled him backward through the door, and shut the congress forever from his view. Once, in company with a friend, the author of "The Hasheesh Eater" paid a visit to the prophet Jonah, who still occupied marine lodgings, "rather cold and damp, to be sure, yet commanding a fine water privilege." Leviathan, having kindly rested his lower jaw upon the beach, raised the portcullis, and allowed them to pass in. They descended a rickety, wooden staircase, and emerging into a shabbier apartment than ever dawned upon the Visiting Committee of a Benevolent Sewing-Circle, they beheld the prophet, looking unutterably lean, seated on a rush-bottomed chair, "mending his sole pair of unmentionables by the aid of a small needle-book . . . . which his mother had given him on leaving home." A shaky, pine table, with "a battered, brazen candlestick holding an inch of half-luminous tallow," and a 'dog's-eared copy of Watt's Hymns, completed the furniture. me. 666 666 666 How do you like your situation?' asked one of the visitors. Can't you leave here when you want to? I should think you would clear out, if you find it uncomfortable.' "I have repeatedly asked my landlord to make out his bill, and let me go,' replied the old gentleman, but he isn't used to casting up his prophets, and I don't know when I shall get off."" Just then Leviathan called out in a hoarse voice to know if the visitors were going to stay all night, as he wanted to put down the shutters." They hastily took leave, and, running up the rick |