Lucky for us he died! We shall find out everything." We held a post-mortem, of course, the condition of the blood being what we most wished to observe; and the autopsy revealed some unexpected details.

One remarkable feature consisted in a certain undescribed and impoverished state of the contained bodies which Sebastian, with his eager zeal for science, desired his students to see and identify.
He said it was likely to throw much light on other ill-understood conditions of the brain and nervous system, as well as on the peculiar faint odour of the insane, now so well recognised in all large asylums.
In order to compare this abnormal state with the aspect of the healthy circulating medium, he proposed to examine a little good living blood side by side with the morbid specimen under the microscope.

Nurse Wade was in attendance in the laboratory, as usual.

The Professor, standing by the instrument, with one hand on the brass screw, had got the diseased drop ready arranged for our inspection beforehand, and was gloating over it himself with scientific enthusiasm.

"Grey corpuscles, you will observe," he said, "almost entirely deficient.