Page:Confessions of an English opium-eater (IA confessionsofeng00dequrich).pdf/138

 ever, or even to the happiest year, it may be. allowed to any man to point without discountenance from wisdom, This year, in my case, reader, was the one which we have now reached; though it stood, I confess, as a parenthesis between years of a gloomier character. It was a year of brilliant water (to speak after the manner of jewellers), set as it were, and insulated, in the gloom and cloudy melancholy of opium. Strange as it may sound, I had a little before this time descended suddenly, and without any considerable effort, from 320 grains of opium (i.e. eight thousand drops of laudanum) per day, to forty grains, or