time he woke up as if nothing out of the common had happened.  Sebastian fell back upon rabbits again, with smaller and smaller doses.  It was no good; the rabbits all died with great unanimity, until the dose was so 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’Academie de Medecine:  tome 49, 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 shall have to suppress her, Cumberledge. . . .  But I’ll wager my life she’s right, for all that.  I wonder, now, how the dickens she guessed it!”

“Intuition,” I answered.

He pouted his under lip above the upper one, with a dubious acquiescence.  “Inference, I call it,” he retorted.  “All woman’s so-called intuition is, in fact, just rapid and half-unconscious inference.”

He was so full of the subject, however, and so utterly carried away by his scientific ardour, that I regret to say he gave a strong dose of lethodyne at once to each of the matron’s petted and pampered Persian cats, which lounged about her room and were the delight of the convalescents.  They were two peculiarly lazy sultanas of cats—­mere jewels of the harem—­Oriental beauties that loved to bask in the sun or curl themselves up on the rug before the fire and dawdle away their lives in