Page:Microbe Hunters.djvu/188

oratory; there is no record of it, but without a doubt he prayed. . . .

Pasteur did not fancy going up in balloons and he would not fight duels—but no one can question his absolute gameness when he let the horse doctors get him into this dangerous test.

The crowd that came to judge Pasteur on the famous second day of June, 1881, made the previous ones look like mere assemblages at country baseball games. General Councilors were here to-day as well as senators; magnificoes turned out to see this show—tremendous dignitaries who only exhibited themselves to the public at the weddings and funerals of kings and princes. And the newspaper reporters clustered around the famous de Blowitz.

At two o'clock Pasteur and his cohorts marched upon the field and this time there were no snickers, but only a mighty bellowing of hurrahs. Not one of the twenty-four vaccinated sheep—though two days before millions of deadly germs had taken residence under their hides—not one of these sheep, I say, had so much as a trace of fever. They ate and frisked about as if they had never been within a thousand miles of an anthrax bacillus.

But the unprotected, the not vaccinated beasts—alas—there they lay in a tragic row, twenty-two out of twenty-four of them; and the remaining two were staggering about, at grips with that last inexorable, always victorious enemy of all living things. Ominous black blood oozed from their mouths and noses.

"See! There goes another one of those sheep that Pasteur did not vaccinate!" shouted an awed horse doctor.

The Bible does not go into details about what the great wedding crowd thought of Jesus when he turned water into wine, but Pasteur, that second of June, was the impresario of a modern miracle as amazing as any of the marvels wrought