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That hot coffee drinking led him to another curious fact about the little animals. Everything he did led him to pry up some new fact of nature, for he lived wrapped in those tiny dramas that went on under his lenses just as a child listens open-mouthed with saucer eyes to the myths of Mother Goose. . . . He never tired of reading the same story of nature, there were always new angles to be found in it, the pages of his book of nature were thumbed and dog-eared by his insatiable interest. Years after his discovery of the microbes in his mouth one morning in the midst of his sweating from his vast curative coffee drinkings he looked once more at the stuff between his teeth—

What was this? There was not a single little animal to be found. Or there were no living animals rather, for he thought he could make out the bodies of myriads of dead ones—and maybe one or two that moved feebly, as if they were sick. "Blessed Saints!" he growled: "I hope some great Lord of the Royal Society doesn’t try to find those creatures in his mouth, and fail, and then deny my observations. . . ."

But look here! He had been drinking coffee, so hot it had blistered his lips, almost. He had looked for the little animals in the white stuff from between his front teeth. It was just after the coffee he had looked there— Well?

With the help of a magnifying mirror he went at his back teeth. Presto! "With great surprise I saw an incredibly large number of little animals, and in such an unbelievable quantity of the aforementioned stuff, that it is not to be conceived of by those who have not seen it with their own eyes." Then he made delicate experiment in tubes, heating the water with its tiny population to a temperature a little warmer than that of a hot bath. In a moment the creatures stopped their agile runnings to and fro. He cooled the water. They did not come back to life—so! It was that hot coffee that had killed the beasties in his front teeth!

With what delight he watched them once more! But he was bothered, he was troubled, for he couldn’t make out the