The room with its tightly-closed shutters and smoke-blackened walls is filled with recumbent men, in various stages of deshabille, all sunk in the sleep which the bamboo-pipe and the little black pellets of opium ensure.

The success was better than he had a right to expect, for the leaden pellet bored its way through the skull of the wolf, who, with a rasping yelp, made a sidelong plunge, as if diving off a bank into the water, and, striking on the side of his head, rolled over on his back, with his legs vaguely kicking at the moon, and as powerless to do harm as a log of wood.

In the road lay a couple of pigeons, farther on a sparrow, and still farther a sleeping dog, showed how complete had been the effect of the lethal pellets.

Then, for the first time, came the man I had until then believed a myth, and sat beside me in the shadow, and administered to me small, mystic pellets, that he assured me, in low, husky whispers, and foreign accent, would infallibly cure my maladymy physical one, at least; as for the mind, its forces, he regretted to add, were beyond such influence!

A stray pellet might easily blind a man or a horse.

In another instant I should have lodged the fatal pellet!

He was a small, active, spare old fellow, so incrusted with frozen snow, which hung all over him in tiny white pellets, as to resemble more an active, but rather diminutive white bear, than anything else known to Natural History.

Its sides were lined with loose pellets of earth of the average size of a tennis ball, and when we slid down into the hole these rounded clods accompanied us in small avalanches.

'You don't suppose I fear your miserable pellets, do you?