“Oh, let the old fellow rave!” laughed good-natured leucocytes.
But the financier-corpuscle, with the prominent proboscis, coming along with a germ under each arm, rolling half a dozen others in front of him, muttered, savagely:
“Another of those cursed agitators!”
“This wide Man of ours,” pursued the cursed agitator, “is between five and six feet in length, according to his system of measuring. The world that he inhabits is twenty-five thousand miles in circumference. Telepathy has told me so; I have been able to interpret throbs of his intellect to mine. He calls his world the Earth. I say that he is a white corpuscle to the Earth, as we are to him. He will not accept this belief. He argues as do you. Flesh that he lives upon is so gross that he calls it rock and soil; as rivers and brooks he looks upon arteries and veins. He knows of a tide and sees it pulsate. During one ebb and flow, his own heart beats thousands of times. He says the Moon causes the tide. Perhaps; then the Moon is the Earth’s heart. He feels agitations similar to those we know as manquakes. They are very infrequent. He knows that there is heat in the Earth, but can not conceive that it is a source of life, because of its extreme degree. He has no sense of proportion. He can not conceive that a tremendous creature with an existence of ages must move, breathe, and throb in proportion to bulk and longevity, and be sustained by heat that would consume him.”
“Too deep for me!” cried a group of young leucocytes. “Oh, he’s some kind of a fake! Start in advertising something, in a minute!” Each jumped on a red corpuscle and went sliding down hill.
But the studious white corpuscle again stepped forward.
“Friends,” he said, “let us not deride this old person. Let us, rather, point out his astonishing errors to him. Be tolerant, I say! Be tolerant, by all means, even when we are opposed. Sir, we’ll admit that there are many Men instead of only this one, and that all inhabit some vast creature that they call the Earth. But what for? We are here for pleasure, profit, and to store up germs.”
“Are we? For a long time it has been my theory that we are here solely for the welfare of the Man we inhabit; that our food and our enemies are elements inimical to him; we remove them in his behalf.”
“Vile agitator!” The financier-corpuscle, coursing round again, was so agitated that he nearly dropped a germ.