light.
We looked at it again and again, but with the same result.

--Six hours kill 'em all, according to this experiment,--said the
Master.--Good as far as it goes. One more negative result. Do you know
what would have happened if that liquid had been clouded, and we had
found life in the sealed flask? Sir, if that liquid had held life in it
the Vatican would have trembled to hear it, and there would have been
anxious questionings and ominous whisperings in the halls of Lambeth
palace! The accepted cosmogonies on trial, sir!

Traditions, sanctities, creeds, ecclesiastical establishments, all
shaking to know whether my little sixpenny flask of fluid looks muddy
or not! I don't know whether to laugh or shudder. The thought of an
oecumenical council having its leading feature dislocated by my trifling
experiment! The thought, again, of the mighty revolution in human
beliefs and affairs that might grow out of the same insignificant little
phenomenon. A wine-glassful of clear liquid growing muddy. If we had
found a wriggle, or a zigzag, or a shoot from one side to the other, in
this last flask, what a scare there would have been, to be sure, in
the schools of the prophets! Talk about your megatherium and your
megalosaurus,--what are these to the bacterium and the vibrio? These are
the dreadful monsters of today. If they show themselves where they have
no business, the little rascals frighten honest folks worse than ever
people were frightened by the Dragon of Rhodes!

The Master gets going sometimes, there is no denying it, until his
imagination runs away with him. He had been trying, as the reader sees,
one of those curious experiments in spontaneous generation, as it is
called, which have been so often instituted of late years, and by
none more thoroughly than by that eminent American student of nature
(Professor Jeffries Wyman) whose process he had imitated with a result
like his.

We got talking over these matters among us the next morning at the
breakfast-table.

We must agree they couldn't stand six hours' boiling,--I said.

--Good for the Pope of Rome!--exclaimed the Master.

--The Landlady drew back with a certain expression of dismay in her
countenance. She hoped he did n't want the Pope to make any more
converts in this country. She had heard a sermon only last Sabbath, and
the minister had made it out, she thought, as plain as could be, that
the Pope was the Man of Sin and that the Church of Rome was--Wel