AN OVERDOSE OF HASHEESH. 511 



My lips and face seemed to myself to be rigid and stony. I thought 

 that I was dying, and, instead of the peace which I had always hoped 

 would wait on my last moments, I was filled with a bitter, dark despair. 

 It was not only death that I feared with a wild, unreasoning terror, 

 but there was a fearful expectation of judgment, which must, I think, 

 be like the torture of lost souls. I felt half sundered from the flesh, 

 and my spiritual sufferings seemed to have begun, although I was 

 conscious of living still. 



One terrible reality — I can hardly term it a fancy even now — that 

 came to me again and again, was so painful that it must, I fear, al- 

 ways be a vividly remembered agony. Like dreams, its vagaries can 

 be accounted for by association of ideas past and passing, but the suf- 

 fering was so intense and the memory of it so haunting that I have 

 acquired a horror of death unknown to me before. I died, as I be- 

 lieved, although by a strange double consciousness I knew that I should 

 again reanimate the body I had left. In leaving it I did not soar 

 away, as one delights to think of the freed spirits soaring. Neither 

 did I linger around dear, familiar scenes. I sank, an intangible, im- 

 palpable shape, through the bed, the floors, the cellar, the earth, down, 

 down, down ! As if I had been a fragment of glass dropping through 

 the ocean, I dropped uninterruptedly through the earth and its atmos- 

 phere, and then fell on and on forever. I was perfectly composed, and 

 speculated curiously upon the strange circumstance that even in going 

 through the solid earth there was no displacement of material, and in 

 my descent I gathered no momentum. I discovered that I was trans- 

 parent and deprived of all power of volition, as well as bereft of the 

 faculties belonging to humanity. But in place of my lost senses I had 

 a marvelously keen sixth sense or power, which I can only describe as 

 an intense superhuman consciousness that in some way embraced 

 all the five and went immeasurably beyond them. As time went on, 

 and my dropping through space continued, I became filled with the 

 most profound loneliness, and a desperate fear took hold of me that I 

 should be thus alone for evermore, and fall and fall eternally without 

 finding rest. 



" Where," I thought, " is the Saviour, who has called his own to his 

 side ? Has he forsaken me now ? " And I strove in my dumb agony 

 to cry to him. There was, it seemed to me, a forgotten text which, 

 if remembered, would be the spell to stop my fatal falling and secure 

 my salvation. I sought in my memory for it, I prayed to recall it, I 

 fought for it madly, wrestling against the terrible fate which seemed 

 to withhold it. Single words of it came to me in disconnected mock- 

 ery, but erased themselves instantaneously. Mentally, I writhed in 

 such hopeless agony that, in thinking of it, I wonder I could have 

 borne such excess of emotion and lived. It was not the small fact of 

 life or death that was at stake, but a soul's everlasting weal. 



Suddenly it came. The thick darkness through which I was sink- 



