His is the 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