Traditions, sanctities, creeds, ecclesiastical establishments, all shaking to know whether my little sixpenny flask of fluid looks muddy or not!  I don’t know whether to laugh or shudder.  The thought of an oecumenical council having its leading feature dislocated by my trifling experiment!  The thought, again, of the mighty revolution in human beliefs and affairs that might grow out of the same insignificant little phenomenon.  A wine-glassful of clear liquid growing muddy.  If we had found a wriggle, or a zigzag, or a shoot from one side to the other, in this last flask, what a scare there would have been, to be sure, in the schools of the prophets!  Talk about your megatherium and your megalosaurus,—­what are these to the bacterium and the vibrio?  These are the dreadful monsters of today.  If they show themselves where they have no business, the little rascals frighten honest folks worse than ever people were frightened by the Dragon of Rhodes!

The Master gets going sometimes, there is no denying it, until his imagination runs away with him.  He had been trying, as the reader sees, one of those curious experiments in spontaneous generation, as it is called, which have been so often instituted of late years, and by none more thoroughly than by that eminent American student of nature (Professor Jeffries Wyman) whose process he had imitated with a result like his.

We got talking over these matters among us the next morning at the breakfast-table.

We must agree they couldn’t stand six hours’ boiling,—­I said.

—­Good for the Pope of Rome!—­exclaimed the Master.

—­The Landlady drew back with a certain expression of dismay in her countenance.  She hoped he did n’t want the Pope to make any more converts in this country.  She had heard a sermon only last Sabbath, and the minister had made it out, she thought, as plain as could be, that the Pope was the Man of Sin and that the Church of Rome was—­Well, there was very strong names applied to her in Scripture.

What was good for the Pope was good for your minister, too, my dear madam,—­said the Master.  Good for everybody that is afraid of what people call “science.”  If it should prove that dead things come to life of themselves, it would be awkward, you know, because then somebody will get up and say if one dead thing made itself alive another might, and so perhaps the earth peopled itself without any help.  Possibly the difficulty wouldn’t be so great as many people suppose.  We might perhaps find room for a Creator after all, as we do now, though we see a little brown seed grow till it sucks up the juices of half an acre of ground, apparently all by its own inherent power.  That does not stagger us; I am not sure that it would if Mr. Crosses or Mr. Weekes’s acarus should show himself all of a sudden, as they said he did, in certain mineral mixtures acted on by electricity.

The Landlady was off soundings, and looking vacant enough by this time.