gone, of germs and
germ-diseases.

"Yes, yes, Edwin; I had forgotten. Sometimes the memory of the past is
very strong upon me, and I forget that I am a dirty old man, clad in
goat-skin, wandering with my savage grandsons who are goatherds in
the primeval wilderness. 'The fleeting systems lapse like foam,' and so
lapsed our glorious, colossal civilization. I am Granser, a tired old
man. I belong to the tribe of Santa Rosans. I married into that tribe.
My sons and daughters married into the Chauffeurs, the Sacramen-tos, and
the Palo-Altos. You, Hare-Lip, are of the Chauffeurs. You, Edwin, are
of the Sacramentos. And you, Hoo-Hoo, are of the Palo-Altos. Your tribe
takes its name from a town that was near the seat of another great
institution of learning. It was called Stanford University. Yes, I
remember now. It is perfectly clear. I was telling you of the Scarlet
Death. Where was I in my story?"

"You was telling about germs, the things you can't see but which make
men sick," Edwin prompted.

"Yes, that's where I was. A man did not notice at first when only a few
of these germs got into his body. But each germ broke in half and became
two germs, and they kept doing this very rapidly so that in a short time
there were many millions of them in the body. Then the man was sick. He
had a disease, and the disease was named after the kind of a germ that
was in him. It might be measles, it might be influenza, it might be
yellow fever; it might be any of thousands and thousands of kinds of
diseases.

"Now this is the strange thing about these germs. There were always new
ones coming to live in men's bodies. Long and long and long ago, when
there were only a few men in the world, there were few diseases. But
as men increased and lived closely together in great cities and
civilizations, new diseases arose, new kinds of germs entered their
bodies. Thus were countless millions and billions of human beings
killed. And the more thickly men packed together, the more terrible were
the new diseases that came to be. Long before my time, in the middle
ages, there was the Black Plague that swept across Europe. It swept
across Europe many times. There was tuberculosis, that entered into men
wherever they were thickly packed. A hundred years before my time there
was the bubonic plague. And in Africa was the sleeping sickness. The
bacteriologists fought all these sicknesses and destroyed them, just as
you boys fight the wolves away from you