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 explanation was correct. The dull
rabbits, the sleepy Persian cats, and the silly sheep had died outright
of lethodyne; the cunning, inquisitive raccoon, the quick hawk, and
the active, intense-natured weasels, all most eager, wary, and alert
animals, full of keenness and passion, had recovered quickly.