In this extraordinary book, the author has penned for the reader whose interests lead him into the curious by-paths of life a most energetic picture of hasheesh, "the winning rival of opium as a producer of visions of paradise." In turning these pages, the odor of the hemp fields again teases our nostrils, but we can never recapture the mood in which the manuscript was written. It is therefore given to the reader in its original form, as an expression of a lost rhapsodic period of our existence.