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diminished that it did not send them off to sleep at all. There was no middle course: apparently, to the rabbit kind, lethodyne was either fatal or else inoperative. So it proved to sheep. The new drug killed, or did nothing.

I will not trouble you with all the details of Sebastian's further researches: the curious will find them discussed at length in Volume 237 of the Philosophical Transactions. (See also Comptes Rendus de l'Académie de Médecine, tome xlix. pp. 72 and sequel.) I will restrict myself here to that part of the inquiry which immediately refers to Hilda Wade's history.

'If I were you,' she said to the Professor one morning, when he was most astonished at his contradictory results, 'I would test it on a hawk. If I dare venture on a suggestion I believe you will find that hawks recover.'

The deuce they do!' Sebastian cried. However, he had such confidence in Nurse Wade's judgment that he bought a couple of hawks and tried the treatment on them. Both birds took considerable doses, and, after a period of insensibility extending to several hours, woke up in the end quite bright and lively.

'I see your principle,' the Professor broke out. 'It depends upon diet. Carnivores and birds of prey can take lethodyne with impunity: herbivores and fruit-eaters cannot recover, and die of it. Man, therefore, being partly carnivorous, will doubtless be able more or less to stand it.'

Hilda Wade smiled her sphinx-like smile. 'Not quite that, I fancy,' she answered. 'It will kill cats, I feel sure: at least, most domesticated ones. But it will not kill weasels. Yet both are carnivores.'

'That young woman knows too much!' Sebastian muttered to me, looking after her as she glided noiselessly with her gentle tread down the long white corridor. 'We