Diary of a Drug Fiend

Au Pays de Cocaine 49 cocaine does. The sober continuity of thought is broken up. One goes off at a tangent, a fresh, fierce, fantastic tangent, on the slightest &kcuse. One’s sense of proportion is gone; and despite all the millions of miles that one cheerily goes out of one’s way, one never loses sight of one’s goal. While I have been writing all this, I have never lost sight for a moment of the fact that I am telling you about the box and the letter from Gretel. We met a girl in Paris, half a Red Indian, a lovely baby with the fascination of a fiend and a fund of the foulest stories that ever were told. She lived on cocaine. She was a more or less uneducated girl; and the way she put it was this: ‘I’m in a long, lovely garden, with my arms full of parcels, and I keep on dropping one; and when I stoop to pick it up, I always drop another, and all the time I am sailing along up the garden.” , So this w4s Gretel’s letter. “My DariinG Lou,—I could not begin to tell you the other day how delighted I was to see you My Lady and with such a splendid man for your husband. I don’t blame you for getting married in such a hurry; but, on the other hand, you mustn’t blame your old friends for not being prophets! So I could not be on hand with the goods. However, I have lost no time. You know how poor I am, but I hope you will value the little present I am sending you, not for its own sake, but as a token of my deep affection for the loveliest and most charming girl I know. A word in your ear, my dear Lou: the inside is sometimes better than the outside. With my very kindest regards and best wishes to dear Sir Peter and yourself, though I can’t expect you to know that I even exist at the present, “Yours ever devotedly, “* GRETEL.” Lou threw the letter across the table to me. For