FICTION
209
the better to control the experiment, had informed the victim, and
her family, that she had naught but a severe case of chickenpox,
which they would cure forthwith .) This woman, of sturdy physique,
and enjoying, it seems, fairly good health,-excepting, of course,
the lethal contagion-quite amazed the gentlemen of science, by
enduring some
nine days, three hours, andforty1our minutes:
for they held
the normal span of endurance, based upon the Jellyby victim, to be
a mere forty-eight hours. (By "normal" Dr. Fuerst meant, I
assume, normal in a rabid victim of the white race.)
These findings were
all
most remarkable, yet, needless to say,
very sketchy; for much more research was required, and a great
quantity of hard data, before the Foundation would wish to set its
findings before the world,-being, as it hardly needs amplification,
an estimable organization, and not composed of scientists of the
crank or "inspirational" school. Unfortunately, however, the single
case of rabies that was reported, along the Atlantic seaboard, within
the next month, was that of a gentleman of the Caucasian race: a
well-to-do Wall Street attorney, in fact, who succumbed to a blazing
fever not many hours after having been "brushed" in the face,
whilst riding his steed in Central Park, by what he declared to
have been a "large, soft, black-feathered bird," but which was,
doubtless, a rabid bat. This case was of course immediately referred
to the crack team of rabies specialists, at Massachusetts General,
who, employing a procedure very close to that of Pasteur's,–
involving some thirteen inoculations, of increasingly powerful
vaccine, over a period of ten days-managed to save the gentleman:
with the unlook'd-to result that,
within eighteen days,
he gave every
appearance of being fully recovered!-and could not bestow enough
praise, upon his physicians, and upon the world of modern science,
in general.
This incident, by-the-by, occurred in late May, of 1897.
(Herewith, an amusing interruption: for, at this point in Dr.
Fuerst's solemn lecture, a husky bulldog waddled down one of the
side aisles of the hall, and gave the learned gentleman quite a start!
The redoubtable canine had been dozing beneath his master's
seat, -for, in those more companionable days at Princeton
University, undergraduate men were allowed to keep dogs; and
bulldogs were the breed most favored-when, for some undisclosed
reason, he roused himself, and, unbeknownst to his young master,
who was, I suspect, a-drowse as well, ventured out into the aisle,
