The Professor obtained his first hint of the new body by a mere accident.  His friend, the Deputy Prosector of the Zoological Society, had mixed a draught for a sick raccoon at the Gardens, and, by some mistake in a bottle, had mixed it wrongly. (I purposely refrain from mentioning the ingredients, as they are drugs which can be easily obtained in isolation at any chemist’s, though when compounded they form one of the most dangerous and difficult to detect of organic poisons.  I do not desire to play into the hands of would-be criminals.) The compound on which the Deputy Prosector had thus accidentally lighted sent the raccoon to sleep in the most extraordinary manner.  Indeed, the raccoon slept for thirty-six hours on end, all attempts to awake him, by pulling his tail or tweaking his hair being quite unavailing.  This was a novelty in narcotics; so Sebastian was asked to come and look at the slumbering brute.  He suggested the attempt to perform an operation on the somnolent raccoon by removing, under the influence of the drug, an internal growth, which was considered the probable cause of his illness.  A surgeon was called in, the growth was found and removed, and the raccoon, to everybody’s surprise, continued to slumber peacefully on his straw for five hours afterwards.  At the end of that time he awoke, and stretched himself as if nothing had happened; and though he was, of course, very weak from loss of blood, he immediately displayed a most royal hunger.  He ate up all the maize that was offered him for breakfast, and proceeded to manifest a desire for more by most unequivocal symptoms.

Sebastian was overjoyed.  He now felt sure he had discovered a drug which would supersede chloroform—­a drug more lasting in its immediate effects, and yet far less harmful in its ultimate results on the balance of the system.  A name being wanted for it, he christened it “lethodyne.”  It was the best pain-luller yet invented.

For the next few weeks, at Nat’s, we heard of nothing but lethodyne.  Patients recovered and patients died; but their deaths or recoveries were as dross to lethodyne, an anaesthetic that might revolutionise surgery, and even medicine!  A royal road through disease, with no trouble to the doctor and no pain to the patient!  Lethodyne held the field.  We were all of us, for the moment, intoxicated with lethodyne.

Sebastian’s observations on the new agent occupied several months.  He had begun with the raccoon; he went on, of course, with those poor scapegoats of physiology, domestic rabbits.  Not that in this particular case any painful experiments were in contemplation.  The Professor tried the drug on a dozen or more quite healthy young animals—­with the strange result that they dozed off quietly, and never woke up again.  This nonplussed Sebastian.  He experimented once more on another raccoon, with a smaller dose; the raccoon fell asleep, and slept like a top for fifteen hours, at the end of which