Whether desperate or not, however, the issue of the struggle in 1813 was
what I have mentioned, and from this date the reader is to consider me as
a regular and confirmed opium-eater, of whom to ask whether on any
particular day he had or had not taken opium, would be to ask whether his
lungs had performed respiration, or the heart fulfilled its functions.
You understand now, reader, what I am, and you are by this time aware
that no old gentleman "with a snow-white beard" will have any chance of
persuading me to surrender "the little golden receptacle of the
pernicious drug." No; I give notice to all, whether moralists or
surgeons, that whatever be their pretensions and skill in their
respective lines of practice, they must not hope for any countenance from
me, if they think to begin by any savage proposition for a Lent or a
Ramadan of abstinence from opium. This, then, being all fully understood
between us, we shall in future sail before the wind. Now then, reader,
from 1813, where all this time we have been sitting down and loitering,
rise up, if you please, and walk forward about three years more. Now
draw up the curtain, and you shall see me in a new character.
If any man, poor or rich, were to say that he would tell us what had been
the happiest day in his life, and the why and the wherefore, I suppose
that we should all cry out--Hear him! Hear him! As to the happiest
_day_, that must be very difficult for any wise man to name, because any
event that could occupy so distinguished a place in a man's retrospect of
his life, or be entitled to have shed a special felicity on any one day,
ought to be of such an enduring character as that (accidents apart) it
should have continued to shed the same felicity, or one not
distinguishably less, on many years together.
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