"I am afraid we must hardly let that fine dog in;" she said, with a pleasant smile, which made me feel ashamed. "I am very fond of them; but dear papa is a little nervous now; he has not been well lately."
"I hope you will pardon me for bringing him," I answered, "but he is very old, and a walk is such a treat to him. May I put him in some outhouse? He is as quiet as a lamb. Oh, thank you; that will do beautifully. I hope, I am not interrupting the Professor; his time, of course, is so valuable."
Presently he came down; and I was thoroughly ashamed of my own alarm. Instead of the Brachipod, who used to jump, and gesticulate, and poke knuckles into me, I beheld an infirm, and disabled old man, who was killing himself prematurely, by wanting to know too much about it. His face was melancholy, and almost pitiful, as if from perpetual disappointment; his forehead was channeled with a chart of hopeless soundings; and even the vivacity of his eyes was sad.
"I am very glad to see you," he said kindly, and gazing with a little sigh at me. "I remember you well. But how much you are grown! I fear we used to frighten you, in the days gone by. We took the wrong course altogether. If we had only been gentle, and patient, we might have done much with your singular case, and learned things of very deep interest. It was bad luck. There were too many of us, and the spirit of rivalry spoiled everything. I should have kept you to myself, as I had every right to do. But poor Jargoon, and unhappy Chocolous—you have heard what a sad loss all Science has sustained? Have you not? They have both fallen victims to the spirit of research. I ought not to grieve for them; for there can be no nobler termination to a scientific life. Jargoon, as you know, had a doltish theory—though I should not call it that, when he cannot contradict me—about the universal action on all organisms, of what he called gaseous expansion. He made a great discovery, as he believed, of a primary element, 'Proto-hylic Nephelin,'—intensely inflammable in combination. He was trying its effects upon the human system, by inhalation through a straw; when unhappily Mrs. Jargoon struck a match, to seal an important letter. In a moment, the Professor, and his theories were abolished; so exhaustively, that they could hold the inquest, upon nothing but the calcination of his left glass-eye."
"I never heard anything more shocking," I exclaimed, forgetting all the evil, in the sadness of his end, and admiring the courage of the great discoverer. "And poor Professor Chocolous—was he abolished too?"
"Not so entirely; but perhaps more sadly. You know that by his theory—a perfectly absurd one—all causation was referred to the agency of bacilli—bacteria we used to call them, but the other word is the more correct. Moreover, he was indulging in a life-long hope, to establish, in his own person, the one thing which alone convinces the multitude,—ocular proof (as the outsiders term it) that the human race has lost its noblest, and far more essential member than the head is—in a word, its tail, by assuming an attitude never contemplated, in the scientific stages of evolution. A learned American has, in my opinion, cut the ground from under the feet of Chocolous, by showing that the caudal loss results from the abandonment of the quadrumanous life; and that the only chance of recovery lies in the resignation, not of chair, but house, and the reinstitution of arboreal habitude. But, to pretermit his theories, (which appear to me weak and outrageous) his end, before even the nucleolus of a tail was established, is a most melancholy tale. The very day after he had inoculated his dextral ulna with a new bacillus (discovered in the windpipe of a duck) he received,—as the rule is with learned Germans, and the exception with learned Englishmen,—a most flattering invitation—which is in fact a command—to present himself in very high quarters. You may suppose, what a fuss he was in—for few of those foreigners have much self-respect—to put himself into his very best clothes, and to have all his theories ready in his hat. I suppose, that he would not be allowed to carry that, but I have never had the opportunity of learning."
"Surely, sir," I said, "with all your fame, and all the immense things, that you have discovered——"
"No, Tommy, no!" he replied, with much meekness; "but my scientific status is none the worse for that. However, Herr Chocolous, the distinguished German, was happy to be thought worth looking at; and he prepared himself well, in every point but one. He should have provided himself with cross-trees, or guttapercha buffers, ever so small, just to take his bearing. 'What will you do, if you have to sit down?' I asked him, with some prescience of the woe in store for him. 'Bosh!' was his answer, for he loved that word, 'zey vill never ask a poor man, like me, to seet!' 'Well, I dare say not,' I replied, having never found any occasion to understand such things; and off he went, standing up in a Hansom, and looking more like Punch, than a man of any science.
"About a fortnight afterwards, I was sent for, not to Court; oh no, no fear of that for an Englishman!—but to the death-bed of our poor Chocolous; for whom I had always entertained sincere affection and profound respect. I found him as lively as ever, and jumping, to show me how his theories had been established. There was no Mrs. Chocolous, as perhaps you know; and nobody to care for him, except the maid-of-all-work. But she was crying dreadfully; and he was proving to her some new and unsustainable theory of bacilli.
"'I vill be dead,' he cried, 'zis time to-morrow. For vy? For because my teory is ze true one. Both of zem, both of zem, proved in one second! Prachibot, if you leeve, tree tousand year, never you vill have sush triomp!'