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THE MAGIC BULLET
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music and literature and art. "What a democratic man, seeing how great he is!" said the good people of Frankfort, and they named a street after him. Before he was old he was legendary!

Then the rich people worshiped him. A great stroke of luck came in 1906. Mrs. Franziska Speyer, the widow of the rich banker, Georg Speyer, gave him a great sum of money to build the Georg Speyer House, to buy glassware and mice and expert chemists, who could put together the most complicated of his darling dyes with a twist of the wrist, who could make even the crazy drugs that Ehrlich invented on paper. Without this Mrs. Franziska Speyer, Paul Ehrlich might very well never have molded those magic bullets, for that was a job—you can watch what a job!—for a factory full of searchers. Here in this new Speyer House Ehrlich lorded it over chemists and microbe hunters like the president of a company that turned out a thousand automobiles a day. But he was really old-fashioned, and never pressed buttons. He was always popping into one or another of the laboratories every conceivable time of the day, scolding his slaves, patting them on the back, telling them of howling blunders he himself had made, laughing when he was told that his own assistants said he was crazy. He was everywhere! But there was always one way of tracking him down, for ever and again his voice could be heard, bawling down the corridors:

"Ka-de-reit! . . . Ci-gars!" or "Ka-de-reit! . . . Min-er-al wa-ter!"

V

The dyes were a great disappointment. The chemists muttered he was an idiot. But then, you must remember Paul Ehrlich read books. One day, sitting in the one chair in his office that wasn't piled high with them, peering through chemical journals like some Rosicrucian in search of the formula for the philosopher's stone, he came across a wicked drug. It was called "Atoxyl" which means: "Not poisonous." Not poison-