Part 5

"Yes," continued Doctor Roux, "we have conquered hydrophobia; nothing is more certain."

"And you hope to conquer other diseases in the same way?"

The doctor made a fine nervous gesture. "In science one does not hope; one proves. In every thirty thousand experiments one succeeds. We study diseases here. Each physician has his special line of investigation. We hope for nothing. We simply report what we find."

"But you yourself, Doctor Roux, have certainly hopes that diphtheria is almost conquered?"

The doctor pursed up his mouth.

"The investigations in diphtheria are in just this condition. We have proved at the Pasteur Institute" (Doctor Roux is modest and says 'we,' which means himself and his assistant, M. Versin) "that diphtheria is a toxic disease; that is, that it results from a poison. The microbe of diphtheria does not penetrate throughout the system as in the case of most other microbic diseases. It exists only in the mucus found on the pharynx. This microbe does not cause death, but it secretes a poison which penetrates throughout the body and kills. This being proved, of course the next step is to find what will destroy the poison.

"Doctor Behring, working at Berlin, has found that the blood of animals vaccinated for diphtheria gives a therapeutic serum which destroys the diphtheric poison. We are now testing the practical value of the serum at the Institute. This is absolutely our 'last word' on diphtheria."

"And as for cholera! What is the last word?"

"The _bacillus virgula_ of Doctor Koch is believed, by the great majority of savants, to be the true cholera germ. We are trying here, as experimenters are trying elsewhere, to give immunity to animals against the microbe. It is absolutely all that one can say authoritatively on the cholera."

"And the method of vaccination which Doctor Haffkine believes he has discovered?"

"It has not been proved yet that it will give immunity. Until we have that proof we neither hope nor fear. We simply work and wait. Doctor Haffkine has, you know, severed his connection with the Pasteur Institute and gone to India to continue his researches."

"But he has had faith enough in his method to try its effects on himself, has he not?"

"Very true, and so have perhaps a hundred others tried its effects. But that proves nothing."

There is a self-repression about these severe statements which has something of the heroic in it. Who would be so glad to announce absolute safeguards against diphtheria and cholera as this man who has risked his life to find them? Yet, until he is sure, he will not even say "hope."

I remember the words of Pasteur himself: "To believe that one has found an important scientific fact, to be in a fever to announce it, to compel one's self for days, weeks, sometimes years, to be silent, to force one's self to destroy his own experiments and to announce nothing until he has exhausted all contrary hypotheses--that is hard."

It is hard, but it is one of the strongest elements in the Pasteur spirit of scientific research. Evidently Doctor Roux has learned to practise it vigorously.

"In the same way that we are investigating diphtheria and cholera," continues the doctor, "we are studying other diseases. But one cannot get a fair idea of what the Pasteur Institute does by any other means than looking at its organizations. There is a great deal done here besides original investigation. In the first place, we are an absolutely independent and free institution. The money was given by popular subscription and without conditions.

"The entire lower floor is devoted to practical work. There are performed the inoculations for hydrophobia on an average of some seventy a day. The practical department is not, however, confined to the treatment of hydrophobia. There are prepared the vaccines for all those diseases of animals which M. Pasteur has proved can be cured by inoculation, such as chicken cholera, splenic fever, and _rouget_ of swine.

"Quantities of virus are sold constantly to farmers for vaccinating their stock. It is these sales which help support the institution. It is an example of science living by science.

"Here on this floor we do our instructing. In the lecture hall across the way M. Ducloux gives his lessons on microbic chemistry, studies the process of fermentation, microbic poisons, all phases, in short, of biological chemistry.

"My work is lectures on, and experiments illustrating, the technique of the microbic method. Those who follow the courses are divided into two classes, students who simply follow the courses and repeat the experiments in the general laboratory, and the savants who conduct original researches here. The latter are furnished each with a private laboratory in the third story. Here for a merely nominal rent they can have the exclusive use of a laboratory furnished with all necessary apparatus, and can pursue whatever class of investigation pleases them."

"And you have many students?"

"We have always fifteen or twenty, and from all parts of the world. Look at my roll."

The doctor rose and drew out from the mass of pamphlets and papers on his table a big roll-book.

"I have the names of those who have taken my lectures. Here is an Egyptian, many Russians, a Turk, numbers from South America, from Canada, from the East, from everywhere. Let us look for your compatriots."

Doctor Roux ran his finger down the pages. "Here is one, Doctor Orchinard of New Orleans. Here another, Doctor Tabadie of New York; and then there is Kenyoun of the United States Marine Service. But there have been more students in the institution from South America than from North.

"The department of original work is in the third story, and is under Doctor Metchnikoff, who is, you know, a Russian who has established himself here in order to devote himself to scientific investigation. Doctor Metchnikoff is aided by his wife, who acts as _preparateur_. She is an assistant of great skill and delicacy. He receives no salary for his labor. There are, in fact, three of the leading members of our faculty who receive no salary--M. Pasteur himself, M. Ducloux, and M. Metchnikoff. They have resigned the award they deserve because of our insufficient income."

"But the common opinion is that you are rich here."

"I know, but it is a mistake. The Pasteur Institute is very poorly endowed. Its yearly income is only about twenty-four thousand dollars. This revenue comes from three sources: the small appropriations made by the government, the income from the remnant of the private subscription with which it was built, and the product of the sales of vaccine. The fact that we can partly support ourselves," added the doctor, laughingly, "is the best proof one can have of the practicability of bacteriology.

"The most surprising feature about it is, that in the case of almost every institution copied after us, and there are some eighteen or twenty of them in various parts of the world, the income is much larger than ours. At Berlin and St. Petersburg the incomes are four or five times as large as ours, and, excepting Berlin, we are the only Pasteur Institute doing practical work. It is the old story," said the doctor resignedly, "one sows and another reaps."

There is certainly injustice and short-sightedness in such a state of things. The investigations of Pasteur have taken too heavy a bundle from the load of horrors which humanity carries, to be allowed to be limited for lack of money:

Immunity from infectious diseases, and nothing else is the logical outcome of the Pasteur doctrines, means too much to make economy on the part of purse-holders excusable, when it is a question of funds for the investigations. When men like Doctor Roux and his associates, men trained in the severe Pasteur spirit and passionate for truth, are ready to sacrifice their lives to this work, overcoming the earth's plagues, money is the last thing they should be wanting. Especially is this true now, when the work on two of the most terrible scourges of humanity--diphtheria and cholera--stands at critical stages.

There is something harshly ironical, too, in the idea that the institution of Louis Pasteur, whose discoveries have, declares Professor Huxley, made good the war indemnity of five thousand million francs paid by France to Germany, should be crippled for funds.

The doctor's confidences were cut short by an imperative summons from without. I rose to go.

"Take a stroll through the building," advised he as he said good-by. I followed his advice.

From the library one naturally passes to the laboratories. They open from the long halls in numbers. One wonders how so much room can be utilized, but none seems to be going to waste. In each some step of the microbic process is going on. Here is a doctor inoculating a rabbit with the poison of a mad dog sent to the Institute only the day before. The little animal lies on the table insensible, chloroformed, while with the sharp-toothed little trephine the operator makes a tiny hole in its skull, lays bare the brain, and inserts the virus. By the time the aperture is closed Brer Rabbit is sitting up, looking about, none the worse for his experience, save a bald spot on his forehead, a tiny tin tag covered with hieroglyphics hanging from his ear. Two minutes later he was nibbling a carrot; fifteen days later he died "mad as a March hare."

It is not only rabbits which undergo this operation. Guinea-pigs, chickens, mice and rats are used in quantities. In the laboratory of autopsy there are to be seen aquariums filled with the dainty axolotl of Mexico, glasses of odd fish, even cages of birds.

In another room an experimenter is dissecting a rabbit which has died of rabies, and from whose spinal cord he expects to get material for vaccinal virus.

In a small dark room, whose temperature is never allowed to vary, which is never swept nor dusted for fear of arousing tranquil microbes, and whose door is never opened except when absolutely necessary, are arranged rows of drying bottles, in which hang bits of the marrow. These bottles are marked with the degree of violence of the rabies from which the animal died, and with the date when the marrow was put up to dry.

Here, attendants are preparing the veal broth and the gelatines in which the infected marrows will be cultivated.

Thus as one goes from room to room he can follow the whole method of successive cultures, that method which is "the key-stone of the arch, and without which there could be no vigorous demonstration of the Pasteur method."

On every hand one sees the interesting "ways of doing things" which characterize the Institute. Here, the cleaning of jars, syringes and tubes is going on; not a simple washing and drying. In the Pasteur household articles are sterilized as well as cleaned--that is, burned in the flames of a spirit lamp, or in an oven. There, a man is blowing bulbs, droll balloon pipettes, all the multitude of glass contrivances the laboratories demand. Here, under a microscope, an investigator has the diphtheria pest, an inoffensive speck; there, another has in his field a whole colony of lively little straight and bent sticks; it is a company of Doctor Koch's cholera microbes.

Wherever one goes in the building there is a busy intentness, an absorption, an absolute blindness to everything but the work in hand, be it the contents of a culture tube, or the film on a microscope slide. One can easily believe of these workers the story told of M. Pasteur himself, that he had to be hunted up on his wedding morning and pulled away from his microscope, in order to be got into his dress-coat and gloves in time for the ceremony.

Evidently, too, they have not forgotten the words their master spoke on the day of the inauguration of the Institute:

"All the enthusiasm you have had since the beginning, my dear co-laborers, I beg of you to keep; but give it, as an inseparable companion, a severe control. Announce nothing that you cannot prove in a simple, decisive fashion.

"Cultivate the critical spirit. Left to itself it neither awakens ideas nor stimulates to great deeds, but without it all is lost."

As one goes from room to room, and talks with one and another of the busy, courteous savants, he realizes finally that it is here that Pasteur the scientist is to be found. The labors that made the great savant famous are all summed up here. Here his methods are at work, here is his spirit alive in the men who have best comprehended him, and whom he has been able most deeply to inspire. It is a great thing to achieve. It is a greater thing to inspire others to achieve. Louis Pasteur has done both.

STRANGER THAN FICTION.

HUGH BRONTE'S COURTSHIP. THE ELOPEMENT OF HUGH BRONTE AND ALICE MCCLORY.

Unpublished Chapters from "The Brontes in Ireland."

BY DOCTOR WILLIAM WRIGHT.

NOTE.--"The Brontes in Ireland" will be issued in book form by D. Appleton & Co., after the serial publication is concluded in MCCLURE'S MAGAZINE.

I. LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT.

The visit to McClory's in County Down was another momentous step in the life of Hugh Bronte. He had shaken off the nightmare of cruel slavery. His work, mostly in the open air, suited him. He was well paid, had good food and clothing, and in two years the starved and ragged boy had become a large, handsome, well-dressed man. Like most handsome people, Hugh knew that he was handsome, and the resources of Dundalk were taxed in those days to the utmost to set off to perfection his manly and stately figure.

On Christmas Eve Hugh Bronte drove up furiously in a Newry gig to the house of McClory in Ballynaskeagh. He was a somewhat vain man, and fond of admiration, and, no doubt, as he approached McClory's thatched cottage, with his pockets full of money, and with the self-confidence which prosperity breeds, he meant to flutter the house with his greatness.

But a surprise was in store for him. The cottage door was opened, in response to his somewhat boisterous knock, by a young woman of dazzling beauty. Hugh Bronte, previous to his flight, had seen few women except his Aunt Mary, and in the days of his freedom he had become acquainted only with lodging-house keepers and County Louth women who carried their fowl and eggs to Dundalk fairs and markets. He had scarcely ever seen a comely girl, and never in his life any one who had any attractions for him.

The simply dressed, artless girl who opened the door was probably the prettiest girl in County Down at the time. The rector of Magherally, who married her, pronounced her the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Her hair, which hung in a profusion of ringlets round her shoulders, was luminous gold. Her forehead was Parian marble. Her evenly set teeth were lustrous pearls, and the roses of health glowed on her cheeks. She had the long brown eyelashes that in Ireland so often accompany golden hair, and her deep brown eyes had the violet tint and melting expression which, in a diluted form, descended to her granddaughters, and made the plain and irregular faces of the Bronte girls really attractive. The eyes also contained the lambent fire that Mrs. Gaskell noticed in Charlotte's eyes, ready to flash indignation and scorn. She had a tall and stately figure, with head well poised above a graceful neck and well-formed bust; but she did not communicate these graces of form to her granddaughters. There are people still living who remember the stately old woman, "Alys Bronte," as she was called by her neighbors in her old age.

Hugh Bronte was completely unmanned by the radiant beauty of the simple country girl who stood before him. He stood awkwardly staring at her with his mouth open, working with his hat, and trying in vain to say something. At last he stammered out a question about Mr. McClory, and the girl, who was Alice McClory, told him that her brother would soon be home, and invited him into the house.

He entered, blushing and feeling uncomfortable, but the unaffected simplicity of Alice McClory's manner soon put him at his ease, and before the brother Patrick, known afterwards as "Red Paddy," had returned home, he was madly and hopelessly in love with his sister.

Like his son, the Reverend Patrick Bronte, in England, and like the Irish curate who proposed marriage to Charlotte on the strength of one night's acquaintance, Hugh, dazzled by beauty and blinded by love, declared his passion before he had discovered any signs of mutual liking, or had any evidence that his advances would be agreeable.

Alice, in simple, but cold and business-like manner, told him that she did not yet know him; but that as he was a Protestant, and she a Catholic, there was an insuperable bar between them.

Hugh urged that he himself had no religion, never having darkened a church door, and that he was quite willing to be anything she wished him to be.

Alice met his earnest pleadings with playful sallies which disconcerted him, and little by little she led him to the story of his life, episodes of which she had heard from her brother. Pity melts the heart to love, and Alice was moved greatly by Hugh's simple narrative.

II. PURE LOVE AND PARTY STRIFE.

The Christmas holidays passed pleasantly under the hospitable roof of the McClory family. The chief amusement of the neighborhood was drinking in the shebeen, or local public house, but Hugh declined to accompany Paddy to the shebeen, preferring solitude with his sister.

Before the holidays had come to a close, Hugh and Alice had become engaged, but the course of true love in their case was destined to the proverbial fate. All Miss McClory's friends were scandalized at the thought of her consenting to marry a Protestant.

Religion, among Catholics and Orangemen, in those days, consisted largely of party hatred. He was a good Protestant who, sober as well as drunk, cursed the Pope, and on the 12th of July wore orange colors, and played with fife and drum a tune known as "The Battle of the Boyne." And he was a good Catholic who, in whatever condition, used equally emphatic language regarding King William. No more genuine expression of religious feeling was looked for on either side.

There is a story told in the McClory district which illustrates the current religious sentiment. Two brother Orangemen, good men after their lights, had long been fast friends. They seldom missed an opportunity, in the presence of Catholics, of consigning the Pope to an uncomfortable place, to which he himself has been wont to consign heretics.

It happened that one of the two Orangemen fell sick, and when he was at the point of death his friend became greatly concerned about his spiritual state, and visited him. He found him in an unconscious condition, and sinking fast; and putting his lips close to the ear of his sick friend, he asked him to give him a sign that he felt spiritually happy. The dying man, with a last supreme effort, raised his voice above a whisper, and in the venerable and well-known formula cursed the Pope. His friend was comforted, believing that all was well.

Whether this gruesome story be true or not, it goes to illustrate the fact that blasphemous bigotry had largely usurped the place of religion. But bitter party feeling did not end with mere words. Bloody battles between Orangemen and Catholics were periodically fought on the 12th of July, the anniversary of the battle of the Boyne, and on the 17th of March, Saint Patrick's day. Within six miles of McClory's house more than a dozen pitched battles were fought, sometimes with scythes tied on poles, and sometimes with firearms. One of these murderous onsets, known as the battle of Ballynafern, took place within sight of McClory's house.

At Dolly's Brae a battle was fought in 1849, in presence of a large body of troops, who remained neutral spectators of the conflict till the Catholics fled, and then joined with the victors in firing on the flying foe.

The scenes of these struggles, such as Tillyorier, Katesbridge, Hilltown, The Diamond, etc., are classic spots now. Each has had its poet, and ballads are sung to celebrate the prowess of the victors, who were uniformly the Orangemen, inasmuch as they used firearms, while the Catholics generally fought with pikes and scythes.

Hugh Bronte had not yet discovered the deep and wide gulf that yawned between Protestants and Catholics, and so he made light of the religious objections of which he had heard so much from Alice. But the Catholic friends of Miss McClory, who had heard the Pope cursed by Protestant lips almost every day of their lives, could not stand by and see a Catholic lamb removed into the Protestant shambles. They came to look on Bronte as a Protestant emissary, more influenced by a fiendish desire to plunder the Catholic fold than by love for their beautiful relative.

Hugh Bronte, in his eager simplicity, wanted to supersede all opposition by getting married immediately, but so great a commotion ensued that he had to return to the kilns at Mount Pleasant, leaving his matrimonial prospects in a very unsatisfactory condition.

Troops of relatives invaded the McClory house daily, and ardent Catholics tried in vain to argue down Alice McClory's newly kindled love. All the Roman Catholic neighbors joined in giving copious advice, and little was talked of in fairs and markets, and at chapel, but the proposed marriage of Alice McClory with an unknown Protestant heretic.

The priest, also, as family friend, was drawn into the matter. In those days Irish priests were educated in France or Italy, and were generally men of culture and refinement. Their horizon had been widened. They had come in contact with the language, literature, and social habits of other peoples, and they had become courteous men of the world. They had to some extent got out of touch with the fierce fanaticism of party strife.

The priest called on Miss McClory. Everybody knew that he had, and awaited the result; but Alice's beauty and simplicity and tears made such an impression on the kind-hearted old priest that his chivalrous instinct was aroused, and he was almost won to the lady's side. The centre of the agitation then shifted from McClory's cottage to the priest's manse, and so hot was the anger of the infuriated Catholics that the good-natured priest promised, sorely against his will, that he would not consent to marry the pair.

Hugh Bronte was nominally a Protestant, but he had not been in a church of any kind from the time he was five years of age. He had received no religious instruction. He could not read the Bible for himself, and no one had ever read it to him, and he was as innocent of any religious bias or bigotry as a savage in Central Africa. Suddenly he found himself the central figure in a fierce religious drama.

At first he was greatly amused, and laughed at the very suggestion of his religion being considered a stumbling-block. From the time he left his father's house he had seldom heard the divine name except in some form of malediction, and religion had brought no consolation to his hard life. He had never presumed to think that he had any relationship to the church, its priests were so gorgeous, and its people so well-to-do. Gallagher had made him familiar with the dread powers of the infernal world, and with the "Blessed Virgin and the saints" in their malevolent capacity, but the malignant hypocrisy of Gallagher was quite as repulsive to him as the vindictive blasphemy of his uncle. In fact, he had lived in an atmosphere untouched by the light or warmth of religion.