1903 The Flowing Bowl by Edward Spencer

STRANGE SWALLOWS

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gradually, a popular drink on the boulevards, where the five o'clock gossip-hour at the cafes came to be known as " the hour of absinthe." Its use is now forbidden in the French army and navy, and no wonder. The evil effects of drink ing it are very apparent: utter derangement of the digestive system, weakened frame, limp muscles, pappy brain, jumpy heart, horrible dreams and hallucinations, with paralysis or idiocy to bring down the curtain. In that seductive, though gruesome book, IVormwood^ Marie Corelli gives a most graphic picture of an absintheur^ once a gay young banker, who, through trouble of no ordinary kind, gradually came under the spell of the " green fairy." I forget how many murders he committed; but his awful experiences and hallucinations will never leave anybody who has read the book. He is haunted for some days by a leopard who accompanies him on his walks abroad, and who lies down at the foot of his bed at night-time—the "jim-jams," in fact, in their worst form. " There are two terrible verses," says a writer on the subject, " in the Revelations of St. John. " And the third angel sounded his trumpet, and there fell a great star from the heavens, burning like a lamp, and it fell upon a third part of the rivers and upon the fountains of waters. And the name of the star is called Wormwood ; and the third part of the waters became Wormwood, and many men died of the waters because they were made bitter." Which seems a very appropriate quotation ;