In this work he had shared a desk with Boyce, to whom it was particularly attractive, and between them they had developed a bacteriological technique rather above the average, taking an imaginative delight in the isolation of the microscopic deadly forms of vegetable life that are responsible for nearly all the physical sufferings of mankind. When they looked together at the banded bacilli of tubercule, stained red with carbolfuchsin, they saw more than a specimen under a coverglass: they saw the chosen and bitter enemies of genius, the malignant, insensate spores of lowest life that had banished Keats to fade in Rome, Shelley to drown by Via Reggio, Stevenson to perish in Samoa: the blind instruments of destruction that were even then draining the last strength from the opium-sodden frame of the author of _The Hound of Heaven_. Here, in a single test-tube, they could see enclosed enough of the organisms of cholera to sweep all Asia with a wave of pestilence; here, stained with Indian ink, the dreamy trypanosome that had wrapped the swarming shores of the Nyanzas of dark Africa in the sleep of death. Both of them were seized with a passionate fever for research, to rid humanity of this insidious and appalling blight. Now, more than ever, they felt the supreme responsibilities of their calling; and when, in their fourth year, they passed on to their work in the medical wards, as clerks to the senior physician at the Infirmary, and saw the effects of bacterial havoc on the bodies of men and women, their enthusiasm rose to a still higher pitch.