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 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