Then the rich people worshiped him. A great stroke of luck came in 1906. Mrs. Franziska Speyer, the widow of the rich banker, Georg Speyer, gave him a great sum of money to build the Georg Speyer House, to buy glassware and mice and expert chemists, who could put together the most complicated of his darling dyes with a twist of the wrist, who could make even the crazy drugs that Ehrlich invented on paper. Without this Mrs. Franziska Speyer, Paul Ehrlich might very well never have molded those magic bullets, for that was a job--you can watch what a job!--for a _factory_ full of searchers. Here in this new Speyer House Ehrlich lorded it over chemists and microbe hunters like the president of a company that turned out a thousand automobiles a day. But he was really old-fashioned, and never pressed buttons. He was always popping into one or another of the laboratories every conceivable time of the day, scolding his slaves, patting them on the back, telling them of howling blunders he himself had made, laughing when he was told that his own assistants said he was crazy. He was everywhere! But there was always one way of tracking him down, for ever and again his voice could be heard, bawling down the corridors: “Ka-de-reit!... Ci-gars!” or “Ka-de-reit!... Min-er-al wa-ter!” V The dyes were a great disappointment. The chemists muttered he was an idiot. But then, you must remember Paul Ehrlich read books. One day, sitting in the one chair in his office that wasn’t piled high with them, peering through chemical journals like some Rosicrucian in search of the formula for the philosopher’s stone, he came across a wicked drug. It was called “Atoxyl” which means: “Not poisonous.” Not poisonous? Atoxyl had _almost_ cured mice with sleeping sickness. Atoxyl had killed mice without sleeping sickness. Atoxyl had been tried on those poor darkies down in Africa. It had not cured them, but an altogether embarrassing number of those darkies had gone blind, stone blind, from Atoxyl before they had had time to die from sleeping sickness. So, you see, this Atoxyl was a sinister medicine that its inventors--had they been living--should have been ashamed of. It was made of a benzene ring, which is nothing more than six atoms of carbon chasing themselves round in a circle like a dog running round biting the end of his tail, and four atoms of hydrogen, and some ammonia and the oxide of arsenic--which everybody knows is poisonous.