a mighty jester, but,
besides, he likes to talk to me about his work; he is one of those men
who find a help and stimulus in talking, and so I have been able to
follow the conception of the New Accelerator right up from a very early
stage. Of course, the greater portion of his experimental work is not
done in Folkestone, but in Gower Street, in the fine new laboratory next
to the hospital that he has been the first to use.

As every one knows, or at least as all intelligent people know, the
special department in which Gibberne has gained so great and deserved a
reputation among physiologists is the action of drugs upon the nervous
system. Upon soporifics, sedatives, and anaesthetics he is, I am told,
unequalled. He is also a chemist of considerable eminence, and I suppose
in the subtle and complex jungle of riddles that centres about the
ganglion cell and the axis fibre there are little cleared places of
his making, little glades of illumination, that, until he sees fit to
publish his results, are still inaccessible to every other living man.
And in the last few years he has been particularly assiduous upon this
question of nervous stimulants, and already, before the discovery of the
New Accelerator, very successful with them. Medical science has to thank
him for at least three distinct and absolutely safe invigorators
of unrivalled value to practising men. In cases of exhaustion the
preparation known as Gibberne's B Syrup has, I suppose, saved more lives
already than any lifeboat round the coast.

"But none of these little things begin to satisfy me yet," he told me
nearly a year ago. "Either they increase the central energy without
affecting the nerves or they simply increase the available energy by
lowering the nervous conductivity; and all of them are unequal and local
in their operation. One wakes up the heart and viscera and leaves
the brain stupefied, one gets at the brain champagne fashion and does
nothing good for the solar plexus, and what I want--and what, if it's an
earthly possibility, I mean to have--is a stimulant that stimulates all
round, that wakes you up for a time from the crown of your head to the
tip of your great toe, and makes you go two--or even three--to everybody
else's one. Eh? That's the thing I'm after."

"It would tire a man," I said.

"Not a doubt of it. And you'd eat double or treble--and all that. But
just think what the thing would mean. Imagine yourself with a little
phial like t