THE POTION OF LAO-TSZE

These herbs were greatly esteemed: such, for instance, as the cynocephalia, or, as the Egyptians themselves termed the asyrites, which was used as a preventive against witchcraft; and the nepenthes which Helen presented in a potion to Menelaus, and which was believed to be powerful in banishing sadness, and in restoring the mind to its accustomed, or even to greater, cheerfulness, were of Egyptian growth.

Poppy, nor the juice of mandragora, nor all the sleeping potions in the world, could ever again restore to him that sweet rest, which he had enjoyed but yesterday.

" "I will tell him you asked me for a love-potion for the engine-driver's wife," Jeremy answered.

Now the biped carries a box of phosphorus in his leather breeches; and in the dead of night the half-illuminated beast steals his magic potion into a cleft in a barn, and half the country is grinning with new fires.

And filling the glass nearly to the brim he downed the huge potion at a single draught.

You seek to draw a sweet potion from a dry stone.

Brangwaine carefully carried this potion on board the ship, and placed it in a cupboard, whence she intended to produce it when the suitable moment came.

Some rather use potions than pills to purge this humour, because that as Heurnius and Crato observe, hic succus a sicco remedio agre trahitur, this juice is not so easily drawn by dry remedies, and as Montanus adviseth 25 cons.

Niocles, his Friend, under the same Sentence, desired he might drink the Potion before him: Phocion said, because he never had denied him any thing he would not even this, the most difficult Request he had ever made.