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dents and came back to peer into his incubator at his precious bottle and advised farmers about their crops and fertilizers and bolted absent-minded meals and peered once more at his tubes—and waited. He went to bed without knowing what was happening in his bottle—it is hard to sleep when you do not know such things. . . .

All the next day it was the same, but toward evening when his legs began to be heavy with failure once more, he muttered: "There is no clear broth that will let me see these beastly rods growing—but I'll just look once more—"

He held the bottle up to the solitary gaslight that painted grotesque giant shadows of the apparatus on the laboratory walls. "Sure enough, there's something changing here," he whispered; "there are rows of little bubbles coming up from some of the gray specks I sowed in the bottle yesterday—there are many new gray specks—all of them are sprouting bubbles!" Then he became deaf and dumb and blind to the world of men; he stayed entranced before his little incubator; hours floated by, hours that might have been seconds for him. He took up his bottle caressingly; he shook it gently before the light—little spirals of gray murky cloud curled up from the bottom of the flask and from these spirals came big bubbles of gas. Now he would find out!

He put a drop from the bottle before his microscope. Eureka! The field of the lens swarmed and vibrated with shimmying millions of the tiny rods. "They multiply! They are alive!" he whispered to himself, then shouted: "Yes, I'll be up in a little while!" to Madame Pasteur who had called down begging him to come up for dinner, to come for a little rest. For hours he did not come.

Time and again in the days that followed he did the same experiment, putting a tiny drop from a flask that swarmed with rods into a fresh clear flask of yeast soup that had none at all—and every time the rods appeared in billions and each time they made new quantities of the acid of sour milk. Then Pasteur burst out—he was net a patient man—to tell the