“Listen—­and see if I have understood you rightly, to wit:  All the atoms that constitute each oxygen molecule are separate individuals, and each is a living animal; all the atoms that constitute each hydrogen molecule are separate individuals, and each one is a living animal; each drop of water consists of millions of living animals, the drop itself is an individual, a living animal, and the wide ocean is another.  Is that it?”

“Yes, that is correct.”

“By George, it beats the band!”

He liked the expression, and set it down in his tablets.

“Franklin, we’ve got it down fine.  And to think—­there are other animals that are still smaller than a hydrogen atom, and yet it is so small that it takes five thousand of them to make a molecule—­a molecule so minute that it could get into a microbe’s eye and he wouldn’t know it was there!”

“Yes, the wee creatures that inhabit the bodies of us germs and feed upon us, and rot us with disease:  Ah, what could they have been created for?  They give us pain, they make our lives miserable, they murder us—­and where is the use of it all, where the wisdom?  Ah, friend Bkshp [microbic orthography], we live in a strange and unaccountable world; our birth is a mystery, our little life is a mystery, a trouble, we pass and are seen no more; all is mystery, mystery, mystery; we know not whence we came, nor why; we know not whither we go, nor why we go.  We only know we were not made in vain, we only know we were made for a wise purpose, and that all is well!  We shall not be cast aside in contumely and unblest after all we have suffered.  Let us be patient, let us not repine, let us trust.  The humblest of us is cared for—­oh, believe it!—­and this fleeting stay is not the end!”

You notice that?  He did not suspect that he, also, was engaged in gnawing, torturing, defiling, rotting, and murdering a fellow-creature —­he and all the swarming billions of his race.  None of them suspects it.  That is significant.  It is suggestive—­irresistibly suggestive —­insistently suggestive.  It hints at the possibility that the procession of known and listed devourers and persecutors is not complete.  It suggests the possibility, and substantially the certainty, that man is himself a microbe, and his globe a blood-corpuscle drifting with its shining brethren of the Milky Way down a vein of the Master and Maker of all things, whose body, mayhap—­glimpsed part-wise from the earth by night, and receding and lost to view in the measureless remotenesses of space—­is what men name the Universe.

Yes, that was all old to me, but to find that our little old familiar microbes were themselves loaded up with microbes that fed them, enriched them, and persistently and faithfully preserved them and their poor old tramp-planet from destruction—­oh, that was new, and too delicious!

I wanted to see them!  I was in a fever to see them!  I had lenses to two-million power, but of course the field was no bigger than a person’s finger-nail, and so it wasn’t possible to compass a considerable spectacle or a landscape with them; whereas what I had been craving was a thirty-foot field, which would represent a spread of several miles of country and show up things in a way to make them worth looking at.  The boys and I had often tried to contrive this improvement, but had failed.