really were, and many things we could not see without the
microscopes at all. Our best ultramicroscopes could make a germ look
forty thousand times larger. A mussel-shell is a thousand fingers like
Edwin's. Take forty mussel-shells, and by as many times larger was the
germ when we looked at it through a microscope. And after that, we
had other ways, by using what we called moving pictures, of making the
forty-thousand-times germ many, many thousand times larger still. And
thus we saw all these things which our eyes of themselves could not see.
Take a grain of sand. Break it into ten pieces. Take one piece and break
it into ten. Break one of those pieces into ten, and one of those into
ten, and one of those into ten, and one of those into ten, and do it all
day, and maybe, by sunset, you will have a piece as small as one of the
germs." The boys were openly incredulous. Hare-Lip sniffed and sneered
and Hoo-Hoo snickered, until Edwin nudged them to be silent.

"The woodtick sucks the blood of the dog, but the germ, being so very
small, goes right into the blood of the body, and there it has
many children. In those days there would be as many as a billion--a
crab-shell, please--as many as that crab-shell in one man's body. We
called germs micro-organisms. When a few million, or a billion, of them
were in a man, in all the blood of a man, he was sick. These germs were
a disease. There were many different kinds of them--more different kinds
than there are grains of sand on this beach. We knew only a few of the
kinds. The micro-organic world was an invisible world, a world we could
not see, and we knew very little about it. Yet we did know something.
There was the _bacillus anthracis_; there was the _micrococcus_; there
was the _Bacterium termo_, and the _Bacterium lactis_--that's what
turns the goat milk sour even to this day, Hare-Lip; and there were
_Schizomycetes_ without end. And there were many others...."

Here the old man launched into a disquisition on germs and their
natures, using words and phrases of such extraordinary length and
meaninglessness, that the boys grinned at one another and looked out
over the deserted ocean till they forgot the old man was babbling on.

"But the Scarlet Death, Granser," Edwin at last suggested.

Granser recollected himself, and with a start tore himself away from the
rostrum of the lecture-hall, where, to another world audience, he
had been expounding the latest theory, sixty years