It was a triumph--in a time of great victories in the fight of men against death. The secret of the spread of malaria--you will hear the not too savory story of it presently--had been found in India and Italy. And as for yellow fever--it seemed as if the yellow jack was to be put to sleep for good. Great Eminences of the medical profession pointed in speeches amid cheers to the deeds of medicine.... The British Empire rang with hosannahs for David Bruce. He was promoted Colonel. He was dubbed Knight Commander of the Bath. Lady Bruce? Well, she was proud of him and stayed his assistant, obscurely. And Bruce still paid, out of his miserable colonel’s salary, her fare on those expeditions they were always making. Africa looked safe for the black men, and open to the benevolent white men. But nature had other notions. She had cards up her sleeve. She almost never lets herself be conquered at a swoop, Napoleonically--as Bruce and Apolo (and who can blame them?) thought they had done. Nature was not going to let her vast specimen cabinet be robbed so easily of every last one of those pretty parasites, the trypanosomes of sleeping sickness. A couple of years passed, and suddenly the Kavirondo people, on the east shore of the Lake where sleeping death had never been--these folks began to go to sleep and not wake up. And there were disturbing reports of hunters coming down with sleeping sickness, even in those places that should have been safe, in the country from which all human life had been moved away. The Royal Society sent out another Commission (Bruce was busy with that affair of goat’s milk giving Malta fever) and one of these new commissioners was a bright young microbe hunter, Tulloch. He went on a picnic one day to a nice part of the shore whose dark green was dotted with scarlet flowers. It must be safe there now, they thought, but a tsetse buzzed, and in less than a year Tulloch had drowsed into his last cold sleep. The Commission went home.... Bruce--you would think he would be looking by this time for some swivel-chair button-pressing job--packed his kit-bag and went back to Uganda, to see what he had left out of those experiments that had looked so sure. He had gone off half-cocked, with that Napoleonic plan of moving a nation, but who can blame him? It had looked so simple, and how expect even the craftiest of the cheaters of Nature to find out, in a year, every single nook where Nature hides the living poisons to kill the presumptuous men who cheat her! Lady Bruce as usual went with him, and they found new epidemics of sleeping sickness flaring up in unwonted places. It was a miserable discouraging business.