for, say, ten years. I don't see why ALL the fun in life should go
to the dealers in ham."

My own interest in the coming drug certainly did not wane in the time.
I have always had a queer little twist towards metaphysics in my
mind. I have always been given to paradoxes about space and time,
and it seemed to me that Gibberne was really preparing no less
than the absolute acceleration of life. Suppose a man repeatedly
dosed with such a preparation: he would live an active and record
life indeed, but he would be an adult at eleven, middle-aged at
twenty-five, and by thirty well on the road to senile decay. It seemed
to me that so far Gibberne was only going to do for any one who
took his drug exactly what Nature has done for the Jews and Orientals,
who are men in their teens and aged by fifty, and quicker in thought
and act than we are all the time. The marvel of drugs has always
been great to my mind; you can madden a man, calm a man, make him
incredibly strong and alert or a helpless log, quicken this passion
and allay that, all by means of drugs, and here was a new miracle
to be added to this strange armoury of phials the doctors use!
But Gibberne was far too eager upon his technical points to enter
very keenly into my aspect of the question.

It was the 7th or 8th of August when he told me the distillation
that would decide his failure or success for a time was going forward
as we talked, and it was on the 10th that he told me the thing was
done and the New Accelerator a tangible reality in the world. I met
him as I was going up the Sandgate Hill towards Folkestone--I think
I was going to get my hair cut, and he came hurrying down to meet
me--I suppose he was coming to my house to tell me at once of his
success. I remember that his eyes were unusually bright and his face