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of this Bureau. The Chief was a good man named Salmon. He was enthusiastically interested in what germs might do to cows and sincerely passionate about the importance of bacilli to pigs—but he knew nothing of how to find the microbes harassing these valuable creatures. Then there was Mr. Kilborne who rejoiced in the degree of Bachelor of Agriculture and was something of a horse doctor (he now runs a hardware store in New York, up-state). And finally, this staff to which Smith came, was glorified by the ancient and redoubtable Alexander, a darky ex-slave who sat about solemnly, and when urged, got up to wash the dirty bottles or chaperon the guinea-pigs.

In a little room lighted by a dormer window under the roof in the attic of a government building, Smith set out to hunt microbes. It was his proper business! Naturally he went at it, as if he had been born with a syringe in his hand and a platinum wire in his mouth. Though a university graduate, he read German well, and of nights, with gulps, he gobbled up the brave doings of Robert Koch; like a young duck taking to the water he began to imitate Koch's subtle ways of nursing and waylaying hideous bacilli and those strange spirilla who swim about like living corkscrews. Template:. . "I owe everything to Robert Koch!" he said, and thought of that far-off genius as some country baseball slugger might think of Babe Ruth.

In his dingy attic he was tireless. It made no difference that he was not strong—all day and part of the night he hunted microbes. And he had musician's fingers that helped him to brew microbe soups with very few spillings. In off moments he would swat the regiments of cockroaches who marched without stopping into his attic from the lumber room close by. In a remarkably short time he had taught himself everything needful and began to make cautious discoveries—he invented a queer new safe kind of vaccine, which contained no bacilli but only their filtered formless protein stuff. The heat of his attic was an intensification of the shimmering hell Washington knows how to be, but he wiped the sweat from the end of his