Hilda Wade | Page 4

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 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 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