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even the craftiest of the cheaters of Nature to find out, in a year, every single nook where Nature hides the living poisons to kill the presumptuous men who cheat her! Lady Bruce as usual went with him, and they found new epidemics of sleeping sickness flaring up in unwonted places. It was a miserable discouraging business.

Bruce was a modest man, who had no foolish vanity to tell him that his own theories were superior to brute facts. "My plan has been a washout," you can hear him grumbling. "Somewhere, aside from the human being, those tsetses must get the trypanosomes—maybe it's like the nagana—maybe they can live in wild beasts' blood too. . . ."

Now if Bruce had theories that were a little too simple he was just the same an exceedingly crafty experimenter; if he had a foolish faith in his experiments, he had the persistence to claw his way out of the bogs of disappointment that his simplicity and love of gorgeous deeds got him into. What a stubborn man he was! For, when you think of the menagerie of birds, beasts, fishes and reptiles Uganda is, you wonder why he didn't pack his bags and start back for England. But no. Once more the canoe man paddled Bruce and his lady across to that tangled shore, and they caught flies in places where for three years no man had been. Strange experiments they made in a heat to embarrass a salamander—one laborious complicated record in his notes tells of two thousand, eight hundred and seventy-six flies (which could never have bitten a human sleeping-sickness patient) fed on five monkeys—and two of these monkeys came down with the disease!

"The trypanosomes must be hiding in wild animals!" Bruce cries. So they go to the dangerous Crocodile Point, and catch wild pigs and African gray and purple herons; they bleed sacred ibises and glossy ones; they stab and get blood from plovers and kingfishers and cormorants—and even crocodiles! Everywhere they look for those deadly, hiding, thousandth-of-an-inch-long wigglers.