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first. He put some of this stuff—a drop of it—before his microscope, maybe with an aimless idea of looking for crystals, and he found this drop was full of tiny globules, much smaller than any crystal, and these little globes were yellowish in color, and their insides were full of a swarm of curious dancing specks.

"What can these things be," he muttered. Then suddenly he remembered—

"Of course, I should have known—these are the yeasts you find in all stews that have sugar which is fermenting into alcohol!"

He looked again and saw the wee spheres alone; he saw some in bunches, others in chains, and then to his wonder he came on some with queer buds sprouting from their sides—they looked like sprouts on infinitely tiny seeds.

"Cagniard de la Tour is right. These yeasts are alive. It must be the yeasts that change beet sugar into alcohol!" he cried. "But that doesn't help Mr. Bigo—what on earth can be the matter with the stuff in the sick vats?" He grabbed for the bottle that held the stuff from the sick vat, he sniffed at it, he peered at it with a little magnifying glass, he tasted it, he dipped little strips of blue paper in it and watched them turn red. . . . Then he put a drop from it before his microscope and looked. . . .

"But there are no yeasts in this one; where are the yeasts? There is nothing here but a mass of confused stuff—what is it, what does this mean?" He took the bottle up again and brooded over it with an eye that saw nothing—till at last a different, a strange look of the juice forced its way up into his wool-gathering thoughts. "Here are little gray specks sticking to the walls of the bottle—here are some more floating on the surface—wait! No, there aren't any in the healthy stuff where there are yeasts and alcohol. What can that mean?" he pondered. Then he fished down into the bottle and got a speck, with some trouble, into a drop of pure water; he put it before his microscope. . . .