"Observe an industry that shames lazy fellows like you and myself, Mr. Beard," he called gayly as Andrew came up to him, "Those are cochineal insects--they have but two ends in life--to eat and make dye for our garments. I am experimenting with them now--perhaps next year we can produce the dye in quantities worth your London merchants' notice. Strange, is it not, that a little bug should carry royal colors in its belly?" He delicately shook a few of the insects in his cupped palm and extended it for Andrew's inspection. They ran about it like tiny drops of blood, in an intent, blind busyness. Andrew looked at them with interest, feeling it strange that they did not stain the Doctor's white hand. The man was certainly a compound of the most diverse interests. Now one of the insects fell from the enclosing hand. The Doctor set his foot on it, idly. Andrew shivered. "After breakfast you shall make the grand tour of our settlement," promised the Doctor, replacing the other insects on their fleshy green feeding-place with exquisite care. Two things stuck in Andrew's mind particularly from that first confused trip of inspection--the babbling sound of water in the network of irrigation-canals that made New Sparta like a tropical Venice of palmetto and coquina--and the stink of the rotting indigo in the great vats in the fields where it was steeped and beaten and settled. He had never encountered such an overpowering and all-pervasive stench or such clouds of flies. "You may understand now, why my own house is built some distance from the fields," said the Doctor, offering Andrew the gilt pomander he carried in his hand, and Andrew, putting it gratefully to his nose, understood indeed. "I don't see how your men endure it," he confessed. "Oh--they grow accustomed," said the Doctor, carelessly. He addressed a question in lilting Italian to a bronzed statue whose naked neck crawled with flies. The statue grinned nervously with white teeth and replied. "He says it stinks no worse than a Minorcan," translated the Doctor, smiling, "You would think that when men came to a new country they might give up the narrower prejudices of race--but not so. My Italians hate my Minorcans and my Greeks hate them both. There is always bad blood between one or the other. Of course they intermarry, too, but that only makes things worse." He spoke casually, as of a herd of serviceable but unruly animals, and Andrew sympathized with him. The headship of a mixed colony such as this, must be a constant balancing upon thorns, though the Doctor did not seem bowed down. He walked among his men with the easy grace of a beast-tamer, and yet, Andrew noticed, with the same alert and penetrating eye. "But which are the Minorcans?" said Andrew, vaguely looking for some odd, distinctive type of body or skull, as they passed along. The Doctor smiled. "There is one," he said, pointing. "That fellow testing the vat. I forget his name."