The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth | Page 6

making experiments in chemistry with an insufficient
quantity of material; errors of observation and manipulation become
disproportionately large. It was of extreme importance just at present
that scientific men should assert their right to have their material big.
That was why he was doing his present series of experiments at the
Bond Street College upon Bull Calves, in spite of a certain amount of
inconvenience to the students and professors of other subjects caused
by their incidental levity in the corridors. But the curves he was getting
were quite exceptionally interesting, and would, when published,
amply justify his choice. For his own part, were it not for the
inadequate endowment of science in this country, he would never, if he
could avoid it, work on anything smaller than a whale. But a Public
Vivarium on a sufficient scale to render this possible was, he feared, at
present, in this country at any rate, a Utopian demand. In
Germany--Etc.
As Redwood's Bull calves needed his daily attention, the selection and
equipment of the Experimental Farm fell largely on Bensington. The
entire cost also, was, it was understood, to be defrayed by Bensington,
at least until a grant could be obtained. Accordingly he alternated his

work in the laboratory of his flat with farm hunting up and down the
lines that run southward out of London, and his peering spectacles, his
simple baldness, and his lacerated cloth shoes filled the owners of
numerous undesirable properties with vain hopes. And he advertised in
several daily papers and Nature for a responsible couple (married),
punctual, active, and used to poultry, to take entire charge of an
Experimental Farm of three acres.
He found the place he seemed in need of at Hickleybrow, near Urshot,
in Kent. It was a little queer isolated place, in a dell surrounded by old
pine woods that were black and forbidding at night. A humped shoulder
of down cut it off from the sunset, and a gaunt well with a shattered
penthouse dwarfed the dwelling. The little house was creeperless,
several windows were broken, and the cart shed had a black shadow at
midday. It was a mile and a half from the end house of the village, and
its loneliness was very doubtfully relieved by an ambiguous family of
echoes.
The place impressed Bensington as being eminently adapted to the
requirements of scientific research. He walked over the premises
sketching out coops and runs with a sweeping arm, and he found the
kitchen capable of accommodating a series of incubators and foster
mothers with the very minimum of alteration. He took the place there
and then; on his way back to London he stopped at Dunton Green and
closed with an eligible couple that had answered his advertisements,
and that same evening he succeeded in isolating a sufficient quantity of
Herakleophorbia I. to more than justify these engagements.
The eligible couple who were destined under Mr. Bensington to be the
first almoners on earth of the Food of the Gods, were not only very
perceptibly aged, but also extremely dirty. This latter point Mr.
Bensington did not observe, because nothing destroys the powers of
general observation quite so much as a life of experimental science.
They were named Skinner, Mr. and Mrs. Skinner, and Mr. Bensington
interviewed them in a small room with hermetically sealed windows, a
spotted overmantel looking-glass, and some ailing calceolarias.
Mrs. Skinner was a very little old woman, capless, with dirty white hair

drawn back very very tightly from a face that had begun by being
chiefly, and was now, through the loss of teeth and chin, and the
wrinkling up of everything else, ending by being almost
exclusively--nose. She was dressed in slate colour (so far as her dress
had any colour) slashed in one place with red flannel. She let him in
and talked to him guardedly and peered at him round and over her nose,
while Mr. Skinner she alleged made some alteration in his toilette. She
had one tooth that got into her articulations and she held her two long
wrinkled hands nervously together. She told Mr. Bensington that she
had managed fowls for years; and knew all about incubators; in fact,
they themselves had run a Poultry Farm at one time, and it had only
failed at last through the want of pupils. "It's the pupils as pay," said
Mrs. Skinner.
Mr. Skinner, when he appeared, was a large-faced man, with a lisp and
a squint that made him look over the top of your head, slashed slippers
that appealed to Mr. Bensington's sympathies, and a manifest shortness
of buttons. He held his coat and shirt together with one hand and traced
patterns on the black-and-gold tablecloth with the index finger of the
other, while his disengaged eye watched Mr. Bensington's