lest of us is cared for--oh, believe
it!--and this fleeting stay is not the end!"

You notice that? He did not suspect that he, also, was engaged
in gnawing, torturing, defiling, rotting, and murdering a
fellow-creature--he and all the swarming billions of his race. None of
them suspects it. That is significant. It is suggestive--irresistibly
suggestive--insistently suggestive. It hints at the possibility that
the procession of known and listed devourers and persecutors is not
complete. It suggests the possibility, and substantially the certainty,
that man is himself a microbe, and his globe a blood-corpuscle drifting
with its shining brethren of the Milky Way down a vein of the Master
and Maker of all things, whose body, mayhap--glimpsed part-wise from
the earth by night, and receding and lost to view in the measureless
remotenesses of space--is what men name the Universe.

Yes, that was all old to me, but to find that our little old familiar
microbes were themselves loaded up with microbes that fed them, enriched
them, and persistently and faithfully preserved them and their poor old
tramp-planet from destruction--oh, that was new, and too delicious!

I wanted to see them! I was in a fever to see them! I had lenses to
two-million power, but of course the field was no bigger than a person's
finger-nail, and so it wasn't possible to compass a considerable
spectacle or a landscape with them; whereas what I had been craving was
a thirty-foot field, which would represent a spread of several miles of
country and show up things in a way to make them worth looking at. The
boys and I had often tried to contrive this improvement, but had failed.

I mentioned the matter to the Duke and it made him smile. He said it was
a quite simple thing-he had it at home. I was eager to bargain for the
secret, but he said it was a trifle and not worth bargaining for. He
said:

"Hasn't it occurred to you that all you have to do is to bend an X-ray
to an angle-value of 8.4 and refract it with a parabolism, and there you
are?"

Upon my word, I had never thought of that simple thing! You could have
knocked me down with a feather.

We rigged a microscope for an exhibition at once and put a drop of my
blood under it, which got mashed flat when the lens got shut down upon
it. The result was beyond my dreams. The field stretched miles away,
green and undulating, threaded with streams and roads, and bordered all
down the mellowing distances wi