us investigator of
the veiled worlds? It was with the most buoyant hope that I left my New
England home and established myself in New York.

II

THE LONGING OF A MAN OF SCIENCE

My first step, of course, was to find suitable apartments. These I
obtained, after a couple of days' search, in Fourth Avenue; a very
pretty second-floor unfurnished, containing sitting-room, bedroom, and
a smaller apartment which I intended to fit up as a laboratory. I
furnished my lodgings simply, but rather elegantly, and then devoted
all my energies to the adornment of the temple of my worship. I visited
Pike, the celebrated optician, and passed in review his splendid
collection of microscopes,--Field's Compound, Hingham's, Spencer's,
Nachet's Binocular (that founded on the principles of the stereoscope),
and at length fixed upon that form known as Spencer's Trunnion
Microscope, as combining the greatest number of improvements with an
almost perfect freedom from tremor. Along with this I purchased every
possible accessory,--draw-tubes, micrometers, a _camera-lucida_,
lever-stage, acromatic condensers, white cloud illuminators, prisms,
parabolic condensers, polarizing apparatus, forceps, aquatic boxes,
fishing-tubes, with a host of other articles, all of which would have
been useful in the hands of an experienced microscopist, but, as I
afterwards discovered, were not of the slightest present value to me.
It takes years of practice to know how to use a complicated microscope.
The optician looked suspiciously at me as I made these wholesale
purchases. He evidently was uncertain whether to set me down as some
scientific celebrity or a madman. I think he inclined to the latter
belief. I suppose I was mad. Every great genius is mad upon the subject
in which he is greatest. The unsuccessful madman is disgraced and
called a lunatic.

Mad or not, I set myself to work with a zeal which few scientific
students have ever equalled. I had everything to learn relative to the
delicate study upon which I had embarked,--a study involving the most
earnest patience, the most rigid analytic powers, the steadiest hand,
the most untiring eyes, the most refined and subtile manipulation.

For a long time half my apparatus lay inactively on the shelves of my
laboratory, which was now most amply furnished with every possible
contrivance for facilitating my investigations. The fact was that I did
not know how to use some of my scientific implements,--never hav