fair. He had a blue eye, a broad forehead, a mouth that wore a dreamy expression, and that somewhat pensive air which became so well the Troubadours of France in the olden time.

We cannot say whether Monsieur de Menneval had perpetrated verse; but he loved the poets, the arts, the quiet of the fields, the sunsets, the rosy dawn, the breeze sighing through the foliage, the low and mysterious tones of a harp, sounding at eve from the light bark shooting over the blue waters of the Loire-all things in short that harmonize with that melodious concert of the heart, which passes by the name of love.

He was timid, but he passionately loved the beautiful widow; and his dearest dream was of passing his whole life at her feet, in well chosen retirement, far from those envious lookers-on, who are ever ready to fling their sarcasms on quiet happiness, and who dissemble their envy under cloak of a philosophic skepticism.

He trembled, as he entered the Marchioness's boudoir. He remained standing before her, and blushed as he kissed her hand. At length, encouraged by a smile, emboldened by the solemnity of this coveted interview, he spoke to her of his love, with a poetic simplicity and an unpremeditated warmth of heart-the genuine enthusiasm of a prie t, who has faith in the object of his adoration.

And as he spoke, the Marchioness sighed, and said within herself:

"He is right. Love is happiness. Love is to be two indeed, but one at the same time; and to be free from those importunate intermeddlers, the indifference or the mocking attention of the world."

She remembered, however, the advice of the King, and thus addressed the Baron.

"What will you indeed do, in order to convince me of your affection?"

"All that man can do."

The Baron was less bold than Monsieur de Beaugency, who had talked of conquering a throne. He was probably more sincere.

"I am ambitious," said the widow. "Ah!" replied Monsieur de Menneval, sorrowfully.

"And I would that the man whom I marry, should aspire to every thing, and achieve every thing."

"I will try so to do, if you wish it." "Listen; I give you an hour to reflect. I am, you know, the King's god-daughter. I have begged of him an embassy for you." "Ah!" said Monsieur de Menneval, with indifference.

"It is useless," answered Monsieur de Menneval; "I have no need of reflection, for I love you. Your wishes are my orders to obey you is my only desire. I accept the embassy."

"Never mind!" said she, trembling with joy and blushing deeply. "Pass into the room, wherein you were just now waiting. I must complete my toilet, and I shall then be at your service. I will summon you."

The Marchioness handed out the Baron by the right-hand door, as she had handed out the Marquis by the left; and then said to herself:

"I shall be prettily embarrassed, if Monsieur de Beaugency should consent to end his days at Courlac!"

Thereupon, the King removed the screen and reappeared.

His Majesty stepped quietly to the round table, whereon he had replaced the oranges, and took up one of them.

"Ah!" exclaimed the Marchioness, "I perceive, Sire, that you foresee the difficulty that is about to spring up, and go back accordingly to the oranges, in order to settle it."

As his sole reply, Louis XV. took a small ivory-handled pen-knife from his waistcoat pocket, made an incision in the rind of the orange, peeled it off very neatly, divided the fruit into two parts, and offered one to the astonished Marchioness. "But, Sire, what are you doing?" was her eager inquiry.

"You see that I am eating the orange." "But-"

"It was of no manner of use to us." "You have decided then?" "Unquestionably. Monsieur de Menneval loves you better than Monsieur de Beaugency."

"That is not quite certain yet; let us wait."

"Look," said the King, pointing to the valet, who entered with a note from the Marquis. "You'll soon see."

The widow opened the note, and read: "Madam, I love you-Heaven is my witness; and to give you up is the most cruel of sacrifices. But I am a gentleA gentleman belongs to the King. My life, my blood are his. I cannot, without forfeit of my loyalty, abandon his

man.

service

"Et cetera," chimed in the King, “as was observed by the Abbé Fleury, my tutor. Marchioness, call in Monsieur de Menneval."

Monsieur de Menneval entered, and was greatly troubled to see the King in the widow's boudoir.

"Baron," said his Majesty, "Monsieur de Beaugency was deeply in love with the Marchioness; but he was more deeply still in love-since he would not renounce it, to please her-with the embassy to Prussia. And you, you love the Marchioness much better than you love me, since you would only enter my service for her sake. This leads me to believe that you would be but a lukewarm public servant, and that Monsieur de Beaugency will make an excellent ambassador. He will start for Berlin this evening; and

you shall marry the Marchioness. I will be present at the ceremony."

"Marchioness," whispered Louis XV. in the ear of his god-daughter, "true love is that which does not shrink from a sacrifice."

And the King peeled the second orange and eat it, as he placed the hand of the widow in that of the Baron.

Then he added:

"I have been making three persons happy: the Marchioness, whose indecision I have relieved; the Baron, who shall marry her; and Monsieur de Beaugency, who will perchance prove a sorry ambassador. In all this, I have only neglected my own interests, for I have been eating the oranges without sugar And yet they pretend to say that I am a selfish Monarch!"

DURING my stay in Damascus, that

insatiable curiosity which leads me to prefer the acquisition of all lawful knowledge through the channels of my own personal experience, rather than in less satisfactory and less laborious ways; induced me to make a trial of the celebrated Hasheesh-that remarkable drug which supplies the luxurious Syrian with dreams more alluring and more gorgeous than the Chinese extracts from his darling opium pipe. The use of Hasheesh-which is a preparation of the dried leaves of the cannabis indica-has been familiar to the East for many centuries. During the Crusades, it was frequently used by the Saracen warriors to stimulate them to the work of slaughter, and from the Arabic term of "Hashasheën," or Eaters of Hasheesh, the word "assassin" has been naturally derived. An infusion of the same plant gives to the drink called "bhang," which is in common use throughout India and Malaysia, its peculiar properties. Thus prepared, it is a more fierce and fatal stimulant than the paste of sugar and spices to which the Turk resorts, as the food of his voluptuous evening reveries. While its immediate effects seem to be more potent than those of opium,

COLLINS.

its habitual use, though attended with ultimate and permanent injury to the system, rarely results in such utter wreck of mind and body as that to which the votaries of the latter drug inevitably condemn themselves.

A previous experience of the effect of hasheesh-which I took once, and in a very mild form, while in Egypt-was so peculiar in its character, that my curiosity, instead of being satisfied, only prompted me the more to throw myself, for once, wholly under its influence. The sensations it then produced were those, physically, of exquisite lightness and airiness— mentally, of a wonderfully keen perception of the ludicrous, in the most simple and familiar objects. During the half hour in which it lasted, I was at no time so far under its control, that I could not, with the clearest perception, study the changes through which I passed. I noted, with careful attention, the fine sensations which spread throughout the whole tissue of my nervous fibres, each thrill helping to divest my frame of its earthy and material nature, till my substance appeared to me no grosser than the vapors of the atmosphere, and while sitting in the calm of the Egyptian twilight, I expected to be

lifted up and carried away by the first breeze that should ruffle the Nile. While this process was going on, the objects by which I was surrounded assumed a strange and whimsical expression. My pipe, the oars which my boatmen plied, the turban worn by the captain, the water-jars and culinary implements, became in themselves so inexpressibly absurd and comical, that I was provoked into a long fit of laughter. The hallucination died away as gradually as it came, leaving me overcome with a soft and pleasant drowsiness, from which I sank into a deep, refreshing sleep.

29 66

Two friends-one a fellow-countryman, and the other an English gentleman, who, with his wife, was also residing in Antonio's pleasant caravanserai-agreed to join me in the experiment. The dragoman of the latter was deputed to procure a sufficient quantity of the drug. He was a dark Egyptian, speaking only the lingua franca of the East, and asked me, as he took the money and departed on his mission, whether he should get hasheesh "per ridere, o per dormire? Oh, per ridere, of course" I answered; "and see that it be strong and fresh." It is customary with the Syrians to take a small portion immediately before the evening meal, as it is thus diffused through the stomach and acts more gradually, as well as more gently, upon the system. As our dinner-hour was at sunset, I proposed taking hasheesh at that time, but my friends, fearing that its operation might be more speedy upon fresh subjects, and thus betray them into some absurdity in the presence of the other travellers, preferred waiting until after the meal. It was then agreed that we should retire to a room which the other American occupied jointly with myself, and which, as it rose like a tower one story higher than the rest of the building, was in a manner isolated, and would screen us from observation.

We commenced by taking a tea-spoonfull each of the mixture which Abdallah had procured. This was about the quantity I had taken in Egypt, and as the effect then had been so slight, I judged that we ran no risk of taking an over-dose. The strength of the drug, however, must have been far greater in this instance, for whereas I could in the former case distinguish no flavor but that of sugar and rose leaves, I now found the taste intensely bitter and repulsive to the palate. We allowed the paste to dissolve slowly on our tongues, and sat some time, quietly waiting the result. But, having been taken upon a full stomach, its operation had been

hindered, and after the lapse of nearly an hour, we could not detect the least change in our feelings. My friends loudly expressed their conviction of the humbug of hasheesh, but I, unwilling to give up the experiment at this point, proposed that we should take an additional half spoonful, and follow it with a cup of hot tea, which, if there were really any virtue in the preparation, could not fail to call it into action. This was done, though not without some misgivings, as we were all ignorant of the precise quantity which constituted a dose, and the limits within which the drug could be taken with safety. It was now ten o'clock; the streets of Damascus were gradually becoming silent, and the fair city was bathed in the yellow lustre of the Syrian moon. Only in the marble court-yard below us, a few dragomen and mukkairee, or muleteers, lingering under the lemon-trees, and beside the fountain in the centre.

I was seated alone, nearly in the middle of the room, talking with my friends, who were lounging upon a sofa placed in a sort of alcove, at the farther end, when the same fine nervous thrill of which I have spoken, suddenly shot through me. But this time it was accompanied with a burning sensation at the pit of the stomach, and instead of growing upon me with the gradual pace of healthy slumber, and resolving me, as before, into air, it came with the intensity of a pang, and shot throbbing along the nerves to the extremities of my body. The sense of limitation-of the confinement of our senses within the bounds of our own flesh and blood-instantly fell away. The walls of my frame were burst outward and tumbled into ruin, and without thinking what form I wore losing sight, even, of all idea of form-I felt that I existed throughout a vast extent of space. The blood, pulsed from my heart, sped through uncounted leagues before it reached my extremities; the air drawn into my lungs expanded into seas of limpid ether, and the arch of my skull was broader than the vault of heaven. Within the concave that held my brain were the fathomless deeps of blue; clouds floated there, and the winds of heaven rolled them together, and there shone the orb of the sun. It was though I thought not of that at the time-like the revelation of the mystery of omnipresence. It is difficult to describe this sensation, or the rapidity with which it mastered me. In the state of mental exaltation in which I was then plunged, all sensations, as they rose, suggested more or less coherent

images. They presented themselves to me in a double form-one physical, and therefore to a certain extent tangible; the other spiritual, and revealing itself in a succession of splendid metaphors. The physical feeling of extended being was accompanied by the image of an exploding meteor, not subsiding into darkness, but continuing to shoot from its centre or nucleus-which corresponded to the burning spot at the pit of my stomach-incessant adumbrations of light that finally lost themselves in the infinity of space. To my mind, even now, this image is still the best illustration of my sensations, as I recall them; but I greatly doubt whether the reader will find it equally clear.

My curiosity was now in a way of being satisfied; the spirit (demon, shall I not rather say?) of Hasheesh, had entire possession of me. I was cast upon the flood of his illusions, and drifted helplessly whithersoever they might choose to bear

me.

The thrills which ran through my nervous system became more rapid and fierce, accompanied with sensations that steeped my whole being in unutterable rapture. I was encompassed in a sea of light, through which played the pure, harmonious colors that are born of light. While endeavoring, in broken expressions, to describe my feelings to my friends, who sat looking upon me incredulously-not yet having been affected by the drug-I suddenly found myself at the foot of the great Pyramid of Cheops. The tapering courses of yellow limestone gleamed like gold in the sun, and the pile rose so high that it seemed to lean for support upon the blue arch of the sky. I wished to ascend it, and the wish alone placed me immediately upon its apex, lifted thousands of feet above the wheat-fields and palm-groves of Egypt. I cast my eyes downward, and to my astonishment, saw that it was built, not of limestone, but of huge square plugs of cavendish tobacco! Words cannot paint the overwhelming sense of the ludicrous which I then experienced. I writhed on my chair in an agony of laughter, which was only relieved by the vision melting away like a dissolving view, till out of my confusion of indistinct images and fragments of images, another and more wonderful vision arose.

The more vividly I recall the scene which followed, the more carefully I restore its different features, and separate the many threads of sensation which it wove into one gorgeous web, the more I despair of representing its exceeding glory. I was moving over the Desert, not upon the rocking dromedary, but seated in a

barque made of mother-of-pearl, and studded with jewels of surpassing lustre. The sand was made of grains of gold, and my keel slid through them without jar or sound. The air was radiant with excess of light, though no sun was to be seen. I inhaled the most delicious perfumes; and harmonies, such as Beethoven may have heard in dreams but never wrote, floated around me. The atmosphere itself was light, odor, music; and each and all sublimated beyond any thing the sober senses are capable of receiving. Before me-for a thousand leagues, as it seemed-stretched a vista of rainbows, whose colors gleamed with the splendor of gemsarches of living amethyst, sapphire, emerald, topaz and ruby. By thousands and tens of thousands they flew past me, as my dazzling barge sped down the magnificent arcade, yet the vista still stretched as far before, as ever. I revelled in a sensuous elysium, which was perfect, because no sense was left ungratified. But beyond all, my mind was filled with a boundless feeling of triumph. My journey was that of a conqueror-not of a conqueror who subdues his race, either by love or by will, for I forgot that Man existed-but one victorious over the grandest as well as the subtlest forces of nature. The spirits of Light, Color, Odor, Sound and Motion were my slaves; and having these, I was master of the uni

verse.

Those who are endowed to any extent with the imaginative faculty, must have at least once in their lives experienced feelings which may give them a clue to the exalted sensuous raptures of my triumphal march. The view of a sublime mountain landscape, the hearing of a grand orchestral symphony, or of a choral upborne by the "full-voiced organ," or even the beauty and luxury of a cloudless summer, suggest emotions similar in kind, if less intense. They took a warmth and glow from that pure animal joy which degrades not, but spiritualizes and ennobles our material part, and which differs from cold, abstract intellectual enjoyment, as the flaming diamond of the Orient differs from the icicle of the North. Those finer senses, which occupy a middle ground between our animal and intellectual appetites, were suddenly developed to a pitch beyond what I had ever dreamed, and being thus at one and the same time gratified to the fullest extent of their preternatural capacity, the result was a single harmonious sensation, to describe which human language has no epithet. Mahomet's Paradise, with its palaces of ruby

and emerald, its airs of musk and cassia, and its rivers colder than snow and sweeter than honey, would have been a poor and mean terminus for my arcade of rainbows. Yet in the character of this paradise, in the gorgeous fancies of the Arabian Nights, in the glow and luxury of all Oriental poetry, I now recognize more or less of the agency of hasheesh.

The fulness of my rapture expanded the sense of time; and though the whole vision was probably not more than five minutes in passing through my mind, years seemed to have elapsed while I shot under the dazzling myriads of rainbow arches. By and by, the rainbows, the barque of pearl and jewels, and the desert of golden sand, vanished; and, still bathed in light and perfume, I found myself in a land of green and flowery lawns, divided by hills of gently undulating outline. But, although the vegetation was the richest of earth, there were neither streams nor fountains to be seen; and the people who came from the hills, with brilliant garments that shone in the sun, besought me to give them the blessing of water. Their hands were full of branches of the coral honeysuckle, in bloom. These I took; and, breaking off the flowers one by one, set them in the earth. The slender, trumpet-like tubes immediately became shafts of masonry, and sank deep into the earth; the lip of the flower changed into a circular mouth of rose-colored marble, and the people, leaning over its brink, lowered their pitchers to the bottom with cords, and drew them up again, filled to the brim, and dripping with honey.

The most remarkable feature of these illusions was, that at the time when I was most completely under their influence, I knew myself to be seated in the tower of Antonio's hotel in Damascus, knew that I had taken hasheesh, and that the strange, gorgeous and ludicrous fancies which possessed me, were the effect of it. At the very same instant that I looked upon the Valley of the Nile from the pyramid, slid over the desert, or created my marvellous wells in that beautiful pastoral country, I saw the furniture of my room, its mosaic pavement, the quaint Saracenic niches in the walls, the painted and gilded beams of the ceiling, and the couch in the recess before me, with my two companions watching me. Both sensations were simultaneous, and equally palpable. While I was most given up to the magnificent delusion, I saw its cause and felt its absurdity most clearly. Metaphysicians say that the mind is incapable of performing two operations at the same time, and may

attempt to explain this phenomenon by supposing a rapid and incessant vibration of the perceptions between the two states. This explanation, however, is not satisfactory to me; for not more clearly does a skilful musician, with the same breath blow two distinct musical notes from a bugle, than was I conscious of two distinct conditions of being in the same moment. Yet, singular as it may seem, neither conflicted with the other. My enjoyment of the visions was complete and absolute, undisturbed by the faintest doubt of their reality; while, in some other chamber of my brain, Reason sat coolly watching them, and heaping the liveliest ridicule on their fantastic features. One set of nerves was thrilled with the bliss of the gods, while another was convulsed with unquenchable laughter at that very bliss. My highest ecstasies could not bear down and silence the weight of my ridicule, which, in its turn, was powerless to prevent me from running into other and more gorgeous absurdities. I was double, not

swan and shadow," but rather, Sphinxlike, human and beast. A true Sphinx, I was a riddle and a mystery to myself.

The drug, which had been retarded in its operation on account of having been taken after a meal, now began to make itself more powerfully felt. The visions were more grotesque than ever, but less agreeable; and there was a painful tension throughout my nervous system-the effect of over-stimulus. I was a mass of transparent jelly, and a confectioner poured me into a twisted mould. I threw my chair aside, and writhed and tortured myself for some time to force my loose substance into the mould. At last, when I had so far succeeded that only one foot remained outside, it was lifted off, and another mould, of still more crooked and intricate shape. substituted. I have no doubt the contortions through which I went, to accomplish the end of my gelatinous destiny, would have been extremely ludicrous to a spectator, but to me they were painful and disagreeable. The sober half of me went into fits of laughter over them, and through that laughter, my vision shifted into another scene. I had laughed until my eyes overflowed profusely. Every tear that dropped, immediately became a large loaf of bread, and tumbled upon the shop-board of a baker in the bazaar at Damascus. The more I laughed, the faster the loaves fell, until. such a pile was raised about the baker, that I could hardly see the top of his head. "The man will be suffocated," I