The habit of opium-smoking is unquestionably the direst curse under which vast, populous China groans.  One who has never visited an opium shop can have no conception of the fatal fascination that holds its victims fast bound—­mind, heart, soul and conscience, all absolutely dead to every impulse but the insatiable, ever-increasing thirst for the damning poison.  I entered one of these dens but once, but I can never forget the terrible sights and sounds of that “place of torment.”  The apartment was spacious, and might have been pleasant but for its foul odors and still fouler scenes of unutterable woe—­the footprints of sin trodden deep in the furrows of those haggard faces and emaciated forms.  On all four sides of the room were couches placed thickly against the walls, and others were scattered over the apartment wherever there was room for them.  On each of these lay extended the wreck of what was once a man.  Some few were old—­all were hollow-eyed, with sunken cheeks and cadaverous countenances; many were clothed in rags, having probably smoked away their last dollar; while others were offering to pawn their only decent garment for an additional dose of the deadly drug.  A decrepit old man raised himself as we entered, drew a long sigh, and then with a half-uttered imprecation on his own folly proceeded to refill his pipe.  This he did by scraping off, with a five-inch steel needle, some opium from the lid of a tiny shell box, rolling the paste into a pill, and then, after heating it in the blaze of a lamp, depositing it within the small aperture of his pipe.  Several short whiffs followed; then the smoker would remove the pipe from his mouth and lie back motionless; then replace the pipe, and with fast-glazing eyes blow the smoke slowly through his pallid nostrils.  As the narcotic effects of the opium began to work he fell back on the couch in a state of silly stupefaction that was alike pitiable and disgusting.  Another smoker, a mere youth, lay with face buried in his hands, and as he lifted his head there was a look of despair such as I have seldom seen.  Though so young, he was a complete wreck, with hollow eyes, sunken chest and a nervous twitching in every muscle.  I spoke to him, and learned that six months before he had lost his whole patrimony by gambling, and came hither to quaff forgetfulness from these Lethean cups; hoping, he said, to find death as well as oblivion.  By far the larger proportion of the smokers were so entirely under the influence of the stupefying poison as to preclude any attempt at conversation, and we passed out from this moral pest-house sick at heart as we thought of these infatuated victims of self-indulgence and their starving families at home.  This baneful habit, once formed, is seldom given up, and from three to five years’ indulgence will utterly wreck the firmest constitution, the frame becoming daily more emaciated, the eyes more sunken and the countenance more cadaverous, till the brain ceases to perform its functions, and death places its seal on the wasted life.