But he was, for all that, something of a chaser of moonbeams, because, finding that his symphonies didn’t turn out to be anything like those of Mozart, he tried literature, in the grand manner. He neglected to write prescriptions while he nursed his natural bent for epic drama. But publishers didn’t care for these masterpieces, and when Ross printed them at his own expense, the public failed to get excited about them. Father Ross became indignant at this dabbling and threatened to stop his allowance, so Ronald (he had spunk) got a job as a ship’s doctor on the Anchor Line between London and New York. On this vessel he observed the emotions and frailties of human nature in the steerage, wrote poetry on the futility of life, and got up his back medical work. Finally he passed the examination for the Indian Medical Service, found the heat of India detestable, but was glad there was little medical practice to attend to, because it left him time to compose now totally forgotten epics and sagas and blood-and-thunder romances. That was the beginning of the career of Ronald Ross! Not that there was no chance for him to hunt microbes in India. Microbes? The very air was thick with them. The water was a soup of them. All around him in Madras were the stinking tanks breeding the Asiatic cholera; he saw men die in thousands of the black plague; he heard their teeth rattle with the ague of malaria, but he had no ears or eyes or nose for all that--for now he forgot literature to become a mathematician. He shut himself up inventing complicated equations. He devised systems of the universe of a grandeur he thought equal to Newton’s. He forgot about these to write another novel. He took twenty-five-mile-a-day walking trips in spite of the heat and then cursed India bitterly because it was so hot. He was ordered off to Burma and to the Island of Moulmein, and here he did remarkable surgical operations--“which cured most of the cases”--though he had never presumed to be a surgeon. He tried everything but impressed hardly anybody; years passed, and, when the Indian Medical Service failed to recognize his various abilities, Ronald Ross cried: “Why work?”