tread, as compared with the dull, tired gait of half an hour before.
They die early, of course; but we have trades in civilised England in
which a man thirty-six years of age is pointed at as a patriarch.

It is also commonly stated that a man who has once begun opium can
never leave it off. This is an entire fallacy. There is a certain
point up to which a smoker may go with impunity, and beyond which he
becomes a lost man in so far as he is unable ever to give up the
practice. Chinamen ask if an opium-smoker has the _yin_ or not;
meaning thereby, has he gradually increased his doses of opium until
he has established a _craving_ for the drug, or is he still a free man
to give it up without endangering his health. Hundreds and thousands
stop short of the _yin_; a few, leaving it far behind them in their
suicidal career, hurry on to premature old age and death. Further,
from one point of view, opium-smoking is a more self-regarding vice
than drunkenness, which entails gout and other evils upon the third
and fourth generation. Posterity can suffer little or nothing at the
hands of the opium-smoker, for to the inveterate smoker all chance of
posterity is denied. This very important result will always act as an
efficient check upon an inordinately extensive use of the drug in
China, where children are regarded as the greatest treasures life has
to give, and blessed is he that has his quiver full.

Indulgence in opium is, moreover, supposed to blunt the moral feelings
of those who indulge; and to a certain extent this is true. If your
servant smokes opium, dismiss him with as little compunction as you
would a drunken coachman; for he can no longer be trusted. His wages
being probably insufficient to supply him with his pipe and leave a
balance for family expenses, he will be driven to squeeze more than
usual, and probably to steal. But to get rid of a writer or a clerk
merely because he is a smoker, however moderate, would be much the
same as dismissing an employe for the heinous offence of drinking two
glasses of beer and a glass of sherry at his dinner-time. An
opium-smoker may be a man of exemplary habits, never even fuddled,
still less stupefied. He may take his pipe because he likes it, or
because it agrees with him; but it does not follow that he must
necessarily make himself, even for the time being, incapable of doing
business. Wine and moonlight were formerly considered indispensables
by Chinese bards; without the