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kind to his wife: the widow Lazear gets a pension of fifteen hundred dollars a year! You see, there are no arguments—and that makes it fun to tell this story of yellow fever. And aside from the pleasure, it has to be told: this history is absolutely necessary to the book of Microbe Hunters. It vindicates Pasteur! At last Pasteur, from his handsome tomb in that basement in Paris, can tell the world: "I told you so!" Because, in 1926, there is hardly enough of the poison of yellow fever left in the world to put on the points of six pins; in a few years there may not be a single speck of that virus left on earth—it will be as completely extinct as the dinosaurs—unless there is a catch in the fine gruesome experiments of Reed and his Spanish immigrants and American soldiers. . . .

It was a grand coöperative fight, that scotching of the yellow jack. It was fought by a strange crew, and the fight was begun by a curious old man, with enviable mutton chop whiskers—his name was Doctor Carlos Finlay—who made an amazingly right guess, who was a terrible muddler at experiments, who was considered by all good Cubans and wise doctors to be a Theorizing Old Fool. What a crazy crank is Finlay, said everybody.

For everybody knew just how to fight that most panic-striking plague, yellow fever; everybody had a different idea of just how to combat it. You should fumigate silks and satins and possessions of folks before they left yellow fever towns—no! that is not enough: you should burn them. You should bury, burn, and utterly destroy these silks and satins and possessions before they come into yellow fever towns. It was wise not to shake hands with friends whose families were dying of yellow fever; it was perfectly safe to shake hands with them. It was best to burn down houses where yellow fever had lurked—no! it was enough to smoke them out with sulphur. But there was one thing nearly everybody in North, Central, and South America had been agreed upon for nearly two hundred years, and that was this: when folks of a town began to turn yellow and hiccup and vomit black, by