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“Oh, y-yes, I understand, of course; but what did the black kind attack me for? And what do they want, anyway?”

“To follow out their destiny, I s’pose. They’re the kind of folks who have missions. Reformers, we call ’em–who want to enforce their peculiar ideas and habits on other people. Sometimes we call them expansionists–fond of colonizing territory that doesn’t belong to them. They wanted to get through the cells to the lymph-passages, thence on to the brain and spinal marrow. Know what that means? Hydrophobia.”

“What’s that?”

“Oh, say, now! You’re too easy.”

“Come, come,” said the other, good-naturedly; “don’t guy him. He never had our advantages. You see, neighbor, we get these points from the subjective brain, which knows all things and gives us our instructions. We’re the white corpuscles,–phagocytes, the scientists call us,–and our work is to police the blood-vessels, and kill off invaders that make trouble. Those red-and-gray chumps can’t take care of themselves, and we must protect ’em. Understand? But this invasion was too much for us, and we had to have help from outside. You must have come in with the first crowd–think I saw you–in at the bite. Second crowd came in through an inoculation tube, and just in time to pull you through.”

“I don’t know,” answered our bewildered friend. “In at the bite? What bite? I was swimming round comfortable-like, and there was a big noise, and then I was alongside of a big white wall, and then—-“

“Exactly; the dog’s tooth. You got into bad company, friend, and you’re well out of it. That first gang is the microbe of rabies, not very well known yet, because a little too small to be seen by most microscopes. All the scientists seem to have learned about ’em is that a colony a few hundred generations old–which they call a culture, or serum–is death on the original bird; and that’s what they sent in to help out. Pasteur’s dead, worse luck, but sometime old Koch’ll find out what we’ve known all along–that it’s only variation from type.”

“Koch!” he answered eagerly and proudly. “Oh, I know Koch; I’ve met him. And I know about microscopes, too. Why, Koch had me under his microscope once. He discovered my family, and named us–the comma bacilli–the Spirilli of Asiatic Cholera.”

In silent horror they drew away from him, and then conversed together. Other white warriors drifting along stopped and joined the conference, and when a hundred or more were massed before him, they spread out to a semi-spherical formation and closed in.

“What’s the matter?” he asked nervously. “What’s wrong? What are you going to do? I haven’t done anything, have I?”

“It’s not what you’ve done, stranger,” said his quondam friend, “or what we’re going to do. It’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to die. Don’t see how you got past quarantine, anyhow.”

“What–why–I don’t want to die. I’ve done nothing. All I want is peace and quiet, and a place to swim where it isn’t too light nor too dark. I mind my own affairs. Let me alone–you hear me–let me alone!”

They answered him not. Slowly and irresistibly the hollow formation contracted–individuals slipping out when necessary–until he was pushed, still protesting, into the nearest movable cave. The walls crashed together and his life went out. When he was cast forth he was in five pieces.

And so our gentle, conservative, non-combative cholera microbe, who only wanted to be left alone to mind his own affairs, met this violent death, a martyr to prejudice and an unsympathetic environment.

* * * * *

Extract from hospital record of the case of John Anderson:

August 18. As period of incubation for both cholera
and hydrophobia has passed and no initial symptoms
of either disease have been noticed, patient is
this day discharged, cured.