mies, might multiply and devastate a city! Wonderful!"

He stood up, and releasing the glass slip from the microscope, held
it in his hand towards the window. "Scarcely visible," he said,
scrutinising the preparation. He hesitated. "Are these--alive? Are
they dangerous now?"

"Those have been stained and killed," said the Bacteriologist. "I
wish, for my own part, we could kill and stain every one of them in
the universe."

"I suppose," the pale man said with a slight smile, "that you scarcely
care to have such things about you in the living--in the active
state?"

"On the contrary, we are obliged to," said the Bacteriologist. "Here,
for instance--" He walked across the room and took up one of several
sealed tubes. "Here is the living thing. This is a cultivation of the
actual living disease bacteria." He hesitated, "Bottled cholera, so to
speak."

A slight gleam of satisfaction appeared momentarily in the face of the
pale man.

"It's a deadly thing to have in your possession," he said, devouring
the little tube with his eyes. The Bacteriologist watched the morbid
pleasure in his visitor's expression. This man, who had visited
him that afternoon with a note of introduction from an old friend,
interested him from the very contrast of their dispositions. The lank
black hair and deep grey eyes, the haggard expression and nervous
manner, the fitful yet keen interest of his visitor were a novel
change from the phlegmatic deliberations of the ordinary scientific
worker with whom the Bacteriologist chiefly associated. It was perhaps
natural, with a hearer evidently so impressionable to the lethal
nature of his topic, to take the most effective aspect of the matter.

He held the tube in his hand thoughtfully. "Yes, here is the
pestilence imprisoned. Only break such a little tube as this into a
supply of drinking-water, say to these minute particles of life that
one must needs stain and examine with the highest powers of the
microscope even to see, and that one can neither smell nor taste--say
to them, 'Go forth, increase and multiply, and replenish the
cisterns,' and death--mysterious, untraceable death, death swift and
terrible, death full of pain and indignity--would be released upon
this city, and go hither and thither seeking his victims. Here he
would take the husband from the wife, here the child from its mother,
here the statesman from his duty, and here the toiler from his
trouble. He would follow the water-mai