So he got himself into a mess. In an abandoned shack he set up a laboratory (little enough he knew about laboratories!) and here he spent weeks learning how to make a culture medium, out of beef broth and agar-agar, to grow the unknown germ of Malta fever in. It ought to be simple to discover it. His ignorance made him think that; and in his inexperience he got the sticky agar-agar over hands and face; it stained his uniform; the stuff set into obstinate jelly when he tried to filter it; he spent weeks doing a job a modern laboratory helper would accomplish in a couple of hours. He said unmentionable things; he called Mrs. Bruce from the tennis lawn, and demanded (surely any woman knew better how to cook) that she help him. Out of his thousand dollars a year he bought monkeys--improvidently--at one dollar and seventy-five cents apiece. He tried to inject the blood of the tortured soldiers into these creatures; but they wriggled out of his hands and bit him and scratched him and were in general infernally lively nuisances. He called to his wife: “Will you hold this monkey for me?” That was the way she became his assistant, and as you will see, for thirty years she remained his right hand, going with him into the most pestilential dirty holes any microbe hunter has ever seen, sharing his poverty, beaming on his obscure glories; she was so important to his tremendous but not notorious conquests.... They were such muddlers at first, it is hard to believe it, but together these newly wed bacteriologists worked and discovered the microbe of Malta fever--and were ordered from Malta for their pains. “What was Bruce up to, anyway?” So asked the high medical officers of the garrison. “Why wasn’t he _treating_ the suffering soldiers--what for was he sticking himself away there in the hole he called his laboratory?” And they denounced him as an idiot, a visionary, a good-for-nothing monkey-tamer and dabbler with test-tubes. And just--he did do this twenty years later--as he might have discovered how the little bacillus of Malta fever sneaks from the udders of goats into the blood of British Tommies, he was ordered away to Egypt. II