They are passing a restless night, concocting the most marvelous cocktails from the chemicals at hand, and the narrator succeeds in drugging Mr Shaynor, the chemist’s assistant, who is suffering from last stage consumption.

Shaynor has all the night been expressing his approval of a certain young lady in a toilet-water advertisement, and as he slips into a trance, he begins to recite poetry to her.

To the narrator's surprise, he begins to compose a poem of Keats; instead of merely writing the lines, he is in all the agonies of composition, and occasionally, in Kipling's opinion, improving on the poet's own work.

"[1]: 260 J. M. S. Tompkins was critical of the story, saying it was "too full of crowded detail which, as it is structural, cannot be eliminated.

"[3] Author John Rhode later used the story as the inspiration for the plot of his 1929 detective novel The House on Tollard Ridge.