The only question now was to raise the money required; and to accomplish this they sold the household effects still in storage, and Mildred, without a word, disposed of the most of her jewelry and brought the proceeds to her father; for the gold and gems worn in days that accorded with their lustre were as nothing to her compared with her father’s life and health.

“I would turn my blood into gold if I could, father,” she said, with swimming eyes, “if it would only make you well and strong as you once were.”

The man’s hand so trembled that he could scarcely receive the money.  When by himself he groaned, “Oh, how awful and deep will be the curse of God if I turn this money against her by using it for the damnedest poison the devil ever brewed!” and he wrapped it up separately with a shudder.

A few days later, with many tears and clinging embraces, they parted with him, his wife whispering in his ear at the last moment, “Martin, my every breath will be a prayer for your safety and health.”

Under the influence of the powerful emotions inspired by this last interview he threw his hypodermic syringe and morphia bottle overboard from the deck of the steamer, saying, with a desperate resolution which only an opium slave could understand, “I’ll break the habit for one week if I die for it,” and he sailed away into what seemed a region of unimaginable horrors, dying ten thousand deaths in the indescribable anguish of his mind and body.  The winter storm that soon overtook the ship was magnified by his disordered intellect until its uproar was appalling in the last degree.  The people on the vessel thought him demented, and for a few days the captain kept him under a continuous guard, and considerately suppressed the cause of his behavior, that was soon revealed by requests for opium that were sometimes pitiful pleadings and again irritable demands.  He soon passed into a condition approaching collapse, vomiting incessantly, and insane in his wild restlessness.  Indeed he might have died had not the captain, in much doubt and anxiety, administered doses of laudanum which, in his inexperience, were appalling in their amount.

At last, more dead than alive, with racking pains, shiverings and exhaustion from prolonged insomnia, he was taken ashore in a Southern city and a physician summoned, who, with a promptness characteristic of the profession, administered a preparation of morphia, and the old fatal spell was renewed at once.  The vitiated system that for days had been largely deprived of its support seized upon the drug again with a craving as irresistible as the downward rush of a torrent.  The man could no more control his appetite than he could an Atlantic tide.  It overwhelmed his enervated will at once, and now that morphine could be obtained he would have it at any and every cost.  Of course he seemingly improved rapidly under its influence, and cunningly disguising his condition from the physician, soon dismissed him and