one with the Flemish gables and the Moorish portico, and it is in the little room with the mullioned bay window that he works when he is down here, and in which of an evening we have so often smoked and talked together.  He is 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 this”—­he held up a little bottle of green glass and marked his points with it—­“and in this precious phial is the power to think twice as fast, move twice as quickly, do twice as much work in a given time as you could otherwise do.”

“But is such a thing possible?”