Mildred set him down when he spoke contemptuously of Elsworth’s Gitano friends.
“Now, Mr. Crowe, you surprise me, as a deep student of natural phenomena, to hear you talk so. Don’t you know—
‘No creature’s made so mean
But that, some way, it boasts, could we investigate,
Its supreme worth’?”
Mr. Crowe did not think the game was worth the candle; besides, it would spoil the artists’ chances to civilize the gipsies.
Elsworth explained that had he attempted to experiment with the cholera patients, if he had been so inclined, he would have fared no better than the native doctors, who were suspected of propagating the disease for the Government, who wished to deplete the population.
“Yes,” said Aunt Janet, “can we wonder at the poor Neapolitans and Spaniards, in the late cholera epidemics, attacking the doctors with sticks and stones, declaring they were spreading the disease—as, in fact, they were—by these abominable vaccinations?”
“I hear that Pasteur’s hydrophobia cure is entirely discredited by the French experts,” said Mildred.
“It is,” replied Elsworth; “and anybody who believed that God, and not the devil, governs the world, might have predicted its failure from the infernal nature of the process for keeping up the supply of the vaccine. Just fancy, keeping in cages, a lot of dogs inoculated with the virus, to inoculate again a lot of rabbits, ready for use for any patient who might want the treatment!”