grow more alarmed than ever before at the ascendency of the drug and his dependence upon it, but when he tried to discontinue its use he found that he had been living so long under the influence of a powerful stimulant that without it he sank like a stone.  Then came the usual compromise of all weak souls—­he would gradually decrease the amount and then the frequency of its use; but, as is generally the case, he put off the beginning of sturdy self-denial until the morrow, and almost every day he poisoned his system with that which also poisoned and demoralized his soul.  He dimly saw his danger, but did not realize it.  With the fatuity of all self-indulgent natures he thought the day would come when, with better prospects and health renewed, he would throw away the spell which bound him and become a free man, but day after day passed and he did not; his appetite began to flag and his energy also; he would sit dreaming for hours when he might have been at work.  At best his agencies would give him but a scanty revenue, although pushed with extraordinary skill and vigor.  As it was, they yielded him little more than personal support, and he began to entertain the hope that if he could only obtain regular employment he could then resume his old regular habits.  Therefore he had agreed to accept a position which was little more than a foothold, and yet if he would go to work with a determined and patient industry he might, by means of it, win more than he had lost.

Could he do this?  The Sunday he had just spent with his family had awakened him as never before to a sense of his bondage.  Even with the society of those he loved to enliven and sustain he had felt that he could not get through the day without the help of the stimulant upon which he had grown so dependent.  While at church it was not the clergyman’s voice he heard, but a low yet imperious and incessant cry for opium.  As he rode home, smiling upon his wife and children, and looking at the beautiful and diversified country, between them and the landscape he ever saw a little brass instrument gauged at four or five times the amount that the physician had at first inserted in his arm.  At the dinner table he had spoken courteously and well on many subjects, and yet ever uppermost in his mind was one constant thought—­opium.  The little diabolical thing itself seemed alive in his pocket, and made its faint yet potent solicitation against his heart.  At last he had muttered, “I will just take a little of the cursed stuff, and then I must begin to break myself in dead earnest.”

The reader knows what followed.  Moreover, he was led to fear that the alternations of mood caused by injections of morphia would be so great that they could not fail to excite remark.  Although the new day brought every motive which can influence a man, Mr. Jocelyn found the path to freedom so steep and difficult that the ascent seemed well-nigh impossible.  His muscles were relaxed, his whole frame so weary