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covery of the tubercle bacillus, it will be regarded as the most important piece of work, scientifically, during the nineteenth century. . . .

Walter Reed was so thorough that you can call him original, as original as any of the microbe hunters of the great line—for he was certainly original in his thoroughness. He might have called it a day—you would swear he was tempted to call it a day: eight men had got yellow fever from mosquito bites, and only one—what amazing luck!—had died.

"But can yellow fever be carried in any other way?" asked Reed.

Everybody believed that clothing and bedding and possessions of yellow fever victims were deadly—millions of dollars worth of clothing and bedding had been destroyed; the Surgeon-General believed it; every eminent physician in America, North, South and Central (excepting that old fool Finlay) believed it. "But can it?" asked Reed, and while he was being so joyfully successful with Kissenger and Spaniards 1, 2, 3, and 4, carpenters came, and built two ugly little houses in Camp Lazear. House No. 1 was the nastier of these two little houses. It was fourteen feet by twenty, it had two doors cleverly arranged one back of the other so no mosquitoes could get into it, it had two windows looking south—they were on the same side as the door, so no draft could blow through that little house. Then it was furnished with a nice stove, to keep the temperature well above ninety, and there were tubs of water in the house—to keep the air as chokey as the hold of a ship in the tropics. So you see it was an uninhabitable little house—under the best of conditions—but now, on the thirtieth of November in 1900, sweating soldiers carried several tightly nailed suspicious-looking boxes, that came from the yellow fever wards of Las Animas—to make this house altogether cursed. . . .

That night, of the thirtieth of November, Walter Reed and James Carroll were the witnesses of a miracle of bravery, for into this House No. 1 walked a young American doctor named