ves in congenial idleness. Strange to say, Hilda's prophecy came true.
Zuleika settled herself down comfortably in the Professor's easy chair
and fell into a sound sleep from which there was no awaking; while
Roxana met fate on the tiger-skin she loved, coiled up in a circle,
and passed from this life of dreams, without knowing it, into one
where dreaming is not. Sebastian noted the facts with a quiet gleam of
satisfaction in his watchful eye, and explained afterwards, with curt
glibness to the angry matron, that her favourites had been "canonised
in the roll of science, as painless martyrs to the advancement of
physiology."

The weasels, on the other hand, with an equal dose, woke up after six
hours as lively as crickets. It was clear that carnivorous tastes were
not the whole solution, for Roxana was famed as a notable mouser.

"Your principle?" Sebastian asked our sibyl, in his brief, quick way.

Hilda's cheek wore a glow of pardonable triumph. The great teacher had
deigned to ask her assistance. "I judged by the analogy of Indian hemp,"
she answered. "This is clearly a similar, but much stronger, narcotic.
Now, whenever I have given Indian hemp by your direction to people of
sluggish, or even of merely bustling temperament, I have noticed that
small doses produce serious effects, and that the after-results are
most undesirable. But when you have prescribed the hemp for nervous,
overstrung, imaginative people, I have observed that they can stand
large amounts of the tincture without evil results, and that the
after-effects pass off rapidly. I who am mercurial in temperament, for
example, can take any amount of Indian hemp without being made ill by
it; while ten drops will send some slow and torpid rustics mad drunk
with excitement--drive them into homicidal mania."

Sebastian nodded his head. He needed no more explanation. "You have hit
it," he said. "I see it at a glance. The old antithesis! All men and all
animals fall, roughly speaking, into two great divisions of type: the
impassioned and the unimpassioned; the vivid and the phlegmatic. I catch
your drift now. Lethodyne is poison to phlegmatic patients, who have not
active power enough to wake up from it unhurt; it is relatively harmless
to the vivid and impassioned, who can be put asleep by it, indeed, for a
few hours more or less, but are alive enough to live on through the coma
and reassert their vitality after it."

I recognised as he spoke that this expl