Page:Microbe Hunters.djvu/247

they can understand—so Pasteur said: "You may not only come to work in our laboratory, but you shall have an entire laboratory to yourself!" Metchnikoff went back to Odessa, getting a dreadful snubbing from Koch on the way, and wondered whether it would not be best to give up his tidy salary at the Russian Institute, to get away from these people yelling for results. . . . But he began to take up his work again, when suddenly something happened that left no doubt in his mind as to what he had better do.

In response to the farmer's complaints of "Where are your vaccines, our flocks are perishing from anthrax!" Metchnikoff had told Dr. Gamaléia to start giving sheep the anthrax vaccine on a large scale. Then, one bright morning, while the Director was with Olga in their summer home, in the country, a fearful telegram came to him from Gamaléia:

"MANY THOUSANDS OF SHEEP KILLED BY THE ANTHRAX VACCINE."

A few months later they were safely installed in the new Pasteur Institute in Paris, and Olga (who enjoyed painting and sculpture much better—but who would do anything for her husband because he was a genius, and always kind to her) this good wife, Olga, held his animals and washed his bottles for Metchnikoff. From then on they marched, hand in hand, over a road strewn with their picturesque mistakes, from one triumph to always greater victories and notorieties.

Metchnikoff bounced into the austere Pasteur Institute and started a circus there which lasted for twenty years; it was as if a skilled proprietor of a medicine show had become pastor of a congregation of sober Quakers. He came to Paris and found himself already notorious. His theory of immunity—it would be better to call it an exciting romance, rather than a