able--if you gave him time--to terms of Toxin; therefore,
argued Dr. Whitty, you could, if you had more time, reduce everything
else to the same terms. There wasn't such a thing as a soul, of
course--it was a manifestation of a combination of Toxins (or
anti-Toxins, I forget which); there was no God--the idea of God was the
result of another combination of Toxins, akin to a belief in the former
illusion. Roughly speaking, I think his general position was that as
Toxins are a secretion of microbes (I am certain of that phrase,
anyhow), so thought and spiritual experiences and so forth are a
secretion of the brain. I know it sounded all very brilliant and
unanswerable and analogous to other things. He hardly ever took the
trouble to say all this; he was far too much interested in what he
already knew, or was just on the point of finding out, to treat of these
extravagant and complicated ramifications of his subject. When he really
got to know his mice and bats, as they deserved to be known, it might be
possible to turn his attention to other things. Meanwhile, it was
foolish and uneconomical. So here he lived, with a man-of-all-work and
his man's wife, and daily went from strength to strength in the
knowledge of Toxins.

* * * * *

It was to this household that there approached, in the month of October,
a small and dismal procession of three.

The doctor was first roused to a sense of what was happening as he
shuffled swiftly through his little powder-closet one morning soon after
breakfast, bearing in his hand the corpse of a mouse which had at last,
and most disappointingly, succumbed to a severe attack of some hybrid of
leprosy. As he flew through to his microscope he became aware of an
altercation in the stable-yard beneath.

"I tell you he ain't a proper doctor," he heard his man explaining; "he
knows nothing about them things."

"My good fellow," began a high, superior voice out of sight; but Dr.
Whitty swept on, and was presently deep in indescribable disgustingness
of the highest possible value to the human race, especially in the South
Seas. Time meant nothing at all to him, when this kind of work was in
hand; and it was after what might be an hour or two hours, or ten
minutes, that he heard a tap on his door.

He uttered a sound without moving his eye, and the door opened.

"Very sorry, sir," said his man, "but there's a party in the yard as
won't--"

The doctor held up h