Reed wrote to stop him: those deaths were too much--but Carroll simply _must_ get some contaminated mosquitoes, and by some bold devilry he did get them, and heigho for this final most horrible experiment! “In my own case,” said Carroll, “produced by the bite of a single mosquito, a fatal result was looked for during several days. I became so firmly convinced that the severity of the attack depended upon the susceptibility of an individual rather than on the number of bites he had got, that on October 9, 1901, at Habana, _I purposely applied to a non-immune eight mosquitoes (all I had) that had been contaminated eighteen days before. The attack that followed was a mild one_,” ended Carroll, triumphantly. But what if that patient had died--as God knows he might have? Such was the strangest of that strange crew, and looking back on this his boldness, in despite of his fanatic prying into dangerous mysteries, my hat is off to this bald-headed bespectacled ex-lumberjack searcher. He himself was the first to be hit, it was Carroll gave the example to those American soldiers, to that civilian clerk, and to those Spanish immigrants--1, 2, 3, and 4--and to all the rest of the unknown numbers of them. And do you remember, in the middle of his attack of yellow fever, that moment when his heart seemed to stop? In 1907, six years after, Carroll’s heart stopped for good.... VII And in 1902, five years before that, Walter Reed, in the prime of his life, but tired, so tired, died--just as the applause of nations grew thunderous--of appendicitis. “I am leaving my wife and daughter so little....” said Walter Reed to his friend Kean, just before the ether cone went down over his face. “So little....” he mumbled as the ether let him down into his last dreams. But let us be proud of our nation, and proud of our Congress--for they voted Mrs. Emilie Laurence Reed, wife of the man who has saved the world no one knows what millions of dollars--let us say nothing of lives--they voted her a handsome pension, of fifteen hundred dollars a year! And the same for the widow of Lazear, and the same for the widow of James Carroll--and surely that was handsome for them, because, as one committee of senators quaintly said: “They can still help themselves.” But what of Private Kissenger, of Ohio, who stood that test, in the interest of science--and for humanity? He didn’t die from yellow fever. And they prevailed upon him, at last, to accept one hundred and fifteen dollars and a gold watch, which was presented to him in the presence of the officers and men of Columbia barracks. He didn’t die--but what was worse, as the yellow fever germs went out of him, a paralysis crept into him--now he sits, counting the hours on his gold watch. But what luck! At the last account he had a good wife to support him by taking in washing.