1848, when Mr. David Urquhart's book was published. More than five and thirty years have since then elapsed, and it should be remembered that hemp plants from Persia and other good districts can now reach us almost ere they have had time to fade. Steam and the Suez Canal have made the pleasures of hachish possible even to the dweller in smoky, unromantic London.
The name, hachish, is particularly interesting as having supplied us with the word assassin. Originally, as I suppose every one knows, an assassin, or as he is still called in Auvergne, an "assashin," simply meant an eater of hachish, and it only came to signify a murderer because hachish was administered by that fanatic brigand, the Old Man of the Mountains, to his followers in order to prime them for the execution of his orders. Doubtless one might do almost anything while under the drug's mysterious influence. It has never, however, incited me to mischief, and certainly not to bloodthirstiness. I have no ill word to speak of it. It has never given me a head-ache, or what the Germans pic-
