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the taut workers snapped at each other across the Bunsen flames. Pasteur was never so appallingly quiet—and the bottle washers fairly jumped across the room to fill his growled orders. Every day Thuillier, Pasteur's new youngest assistant, went out to the farm to put his thermometer carefully under the tails of the inoculated animals to see if they had fever—but thank God, every one of them was standing up beautifully under the heavy dose of the vaccine that was not quite murderous enough to kill rabbits.

While the heads of Roux and Chamberland turned several hairs grayer, Pasteur kept his confidence, and he wrote, with his old charmingly candid opinion of himself: "If success is complete, this will be one of the finest examples of applied science in this country, consecrating one of the greatest and most fruitful discoveries."

His friends shook their heads and lifted their shoulders and murmured: "Napoleonic, my dear Pasteur," and Pasteur did not deny it.

Then on the fateful thirty-first of May all of the forty-eight sheep, two goats, and several cattle—those that were vaccinated and those to which nothing whatever had been done—all of these received a surely fatal dose of virulent anthrax bugs. Roux got down on his knees in the dirt, surrounded by his alcohol lamps and bottles of deadly virus, and awed the crowd by his cool flawless shooting of the poisonous stuff into the more than sixty animals.

With his whole scientific reputation trusted to this one delicate test, realizing at last that he had done the brave but terribly rash thing of letting a frivolous public judge his science Pasteur rolled and tossed around in his bed and got up fifty times that night. He said absolutely nothing when Madame Pasteur tried to encourage him and told him, "Now now everything will come out all right"; he sulked in and out of the lab-