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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 racoon 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 racoon, to everybody's surprise, continued to slumber peacefully on his straw for five hours afterward. 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 racoon: he went on, of course, with those poor scapegoats of physiology, domestic rabbits. Not that in this particular case any pain-