“Take off your coat,” I heard him say. “And now roll your sleeve up. _So! Nun, jetzt_”--he gazed hard into my eyes--“_aber--nur--ausnahmsweise!_” With slow earnest emphasis he repeated the words: “As an exception--only!” I watched him choose the place on my arm, I watched the needle go in with its little prick, I watched him slowly press the small piston that injected the poison into my blood. He, for his part, never once moved his eyes from mine till the operation was ended, and my coat was on again. He wore that curious smile the whole time. “You needed it to-night,” he said, “just a little, a very weak dose--_aber--nur--ausnahmsweise_!” He walked over and put the little Majendie phial back upon the shelf. Then he filled his pipe and drew up the operating chair for me to lie on. His eye was constantly on me. The music was forgotten. He wanted to talk. Whether he had done this thing really to give me a little happiness, or whether his idea was to make me “interesting” for his own sake, I do not know. The fact is that within three minutes of the needle’s prick I was in a state of absolute bliss. A little warm sensation, accompanied by the faintest possible suggestion of nausea which was probably my own imagination, passed up the spine into the head. Something cleared in my brain, then burst. A sense of thawing followed, the melting away of all the things that had been making me unhappy. I began to glow all over. Hope, happiness and a gorgeous confidence flowed in; benevolence, enthusiasm, charity flooded me to the brim. I wanted to forgive Boyde _everything_ to the end of time, sacrifice my entire life to cure my old German friend; everything base, unworthy, sordid in me, it seemed, had dropped away.... The experience is too well-known to bear another description; it varies, of course, with individuals; varies, too, according to the state of health or sickness, according to whether it is needed or not really needed; and while some feel what I felt, others merely sleep, or, on the contrary, cannot sleep at all. The strength of the dose, naturally, is also an important item. Individual reactions, anyhow, are very different, and with Kay, to whom later the doctor gave it too, three doses produced no effect whatever, while the fourth brought on the cumulative result of all four at once, so that we had to walk him up and down, pouring strong black coffee down his unwilling throat, urging him violently not to sleep--the only thing he wanted to do--or he would, old Huebner assured him--never wake again.... In my case, at any rate, wasted physically as I was, empty of food, under-nourished for many weeks, below par being a mild description of my body, the result seemed a radiance that touched ecstasy. It was, of course, an intensification of consciousness.