towards Waterloo Bridge, carefully jostling his infected body
against as many people as possible. The Bacteriologist was so
preoccupied with the vision of him that he scarcely manifested the
slightest surprise at the appearance of Minnie upon the pavement with
his hat and shoes and overcoat. "Very good of you to bring my things,"
he said, and remained lost in contemplation of the receding figure of
the Anarchist.
"You had better get in," he said, still staring. Minnie felt absolutely
convinced now that he was mad, and directed the cabman home on her
own responsibility. "Put on my shoes? Certainly dear," said he, as the
cab began to turn, and hid the strutting black figure, now small in the
distance, from his eyes. Then suddenly something grotesque struck him,
and he laughed. Then he remarked, "It is really very serious, though."
"You see, that man came to my house to see me, and he is an Anarchist.
No--don't faint, or I cannot possibly tell you the rest. And I wanted to
astonish him, not knowing he was an Anarchist, and took up a
cultivation of that new species of Bacterium I was telling you of, that
infest, and I think cause, the blue patches upon various monkeys; and
like a fool, I said it was Asiatic cholera. And he ran away with it to
poison the water of London, and he certainly might have made things
look blue for this civilised city. And now he has swallowed it. Of
course, I cannot say what will happen, but you know it turned that
kitten blue, and the three puppies--in patches, and the sparrow--bright
blue. But the bother is, I shall have all the trouble and expense of
preparing some more.
"Put on my coat on this hot day! Why? Because we might meet Mrs
Jabber. My dear, Mrs Jabber is not a draught. But why should I wear a
coat on a hot day because of Mrs--. Oh! very well."
THE FLOWERING OF THE STRANGE ORCHID
The buying of orchids always has in it a certain speculative flavour.
You have before you the brown shrivelled lump of tissue, and for the
rest you must trust your judgment, or the auctioneer, or your good-luck,
as your taste may incline. The plant may be moribund or dead, or it
may be just a respectable purchase, fair value for your money, or
perhaps--for the thing has happened again and again--there slowly
unfolds before the delighted eyes of the happy purchaser, day after day,
some new variety, some novel richness, a strange twist of the labellum,
or some subtler colouration or unexpected mimicry. Pride, beauty, and
profit blossom together on one delicate green spike, and, it may be,
even immortality. For the new miracle of Nature may stand in need of a
new specific name, and what so convenient as that of its discoverer?
"Johnsmithia"! There have been worse names.
It was perhaps the hope of some such happy discovery that made
Winter-Wedderburn such a frequent attendant at these sales--that hope,
and also, maybe, the fact that he had nothing else of the slightest
interest to do in the world. He was a shy, lonely, rather ineffectual man,
provided with just enough income to keep off the spur of necessity, and
not enough nervous energy to make him seek any exacting
employments. He might have collected stamps or coins, or translated
Horace, or bound books, or invented new species of diatoms. But, as it
happened, he grew orchids, and had one ambitious little hothouse.
"I have a fancy," he said over his coffee, "that something is going to
happen to me to-day." He spoke--as he moved and thought--slowly.
"Oh, don't say that!" said his housekeeper--who was also his remote
cousin. For "something happening" was a euphemism that meant only
one thing to her.
"You misunderstand me. I mean nothing unpleasant ... though what I
do mean I scarcely know.
"To-day," he continued, after a pause, "Peters' are going to sell a batch
of plants from the Andamans and the Indies. I shall go up and see what
they have. It may be I shall buy something good, unawares. That may
be it."
He passed his cup for his second cupful of coffee.
"Are these the things collected by that poor young fellow you told me
of the other day?" asked his cousin as she filled his cup.
"Yes," he said, and became meditative over a piece of toast.
"Nothing ever does happen to me," he remarked presently, beginning to
think aloud. "I wonder why? Things enough happen to other people.
There is Harvey. Only the other week; on Monday he picked up
sixpence, on Wednesday his chicks all had the staggers, on Friday his
cousin came home from Australia, and on Saturday he broke his ankle.
What
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