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AMERICAN SUNDAY MONTHLY MAGAZINE
Published on HiefirstSunday of each month dsa section of the N. Y. American, Boston American, Chicago Examiner, Hearst’s American, Atlanta. Ga., and the second Sunday of each month with the San Francisco Examiner and Ins Angeles Examiner
The SCARLET
n i a fzi j p
a ''is—- '
Synopsis of Previous Instalment—lt
was in the year 2073. Sixty years had
passed since the Scarlet Plague had tumbled
civilization back into the hunting and fish
ing stage. The last survivor of the great
disaster was telling his savage grandchildren,
as they sat on the deserted beach near San
Francisco, of how it all hap|>encd.
Chapter 11
I was very happy," continued
the old man, "and I had beautiful
things to cat. And my' hands
“A Wire because 1 did no work
jfeß " ,l h them, and my body’ was
’ Jiv clean all over and dressed in the
garments ” He sur
veyed his mangy goat-skin with
disgust , “We did not wear such things in those
days. Even the slaves had better garments. And
we were most clean. We washed our faces and
hands often every day. You boys never wash unless
you fall into the water or go in swimming.”
" Wither do you, Granser,” Hoo-Hoo retorted.
"1 know’, I know. I am a filthy old man, but
times have changed. Nobody washes these days,
and there are no conveniences. It is sixty years
since I have seen a piece of soap. You do not know
w hat soap is. and I shall not tell you, for I am telling
the storv <>f the Scarlet Death. You know what sick
ness is. We t ailed it a disease. Yery many of the
diseases came from what we called germs. Remem
ber that word germs. A germ is a very small
thing. 11 is like a woodtick, such as you find on the
dogs in the spring of the year when they run in the
forest. < Inly the germ is very small. It is so small
that you cannot see it —”
Hoo-Hoo began to laugh.
“ You're a queer tin, Granser, talking about things
you can’t see. If you can’t see ’em, how do you
know they are? That's what 1 want to know. How
do you know anything you can’t see?”
"A good question, a very gigxl question, Hoo-
Hoo. But we did sec some of them. We had
what we (ailed microscopes and ultramicroscopes,
and we put them to our eyes and looked through
them, so that we saw things larger than they really
were. and many things we could not see without the 4
microscope at all. Our best tillramicroscope could
make a germ look forty thousand times larger. A
mussel-shell is a thousand fingers like Edwin’s,
l ake forty mu.-scl-shells, and by as many times larger
was the germ when we looked at it through a micro
scope. And after that, we had other ways, by using
what w e called moving pictures, of making the forty
thousand-times germ many, many thousand times
larger still. And thus we saw all these things which
our eves of themselves could not see. Take a grain
of sand. Break it into ten pieces. Take one piece
and break it into ten. Break one of those pieces into
ten. and one of those into ten, and one of those into
ten, and one of those into ten, and do it all day, and
maybe, by sunset, you will have a piece as small as
one of the germs.”
Ihe boys were openly incredulous. Hare-Lip
sniffed and sneered and Hoo-Hoo snickered, until
Edwin nudged them to be silent.
•' I he woodtick sucks the blood of the dog, but the
germ, being so very small, goes right into the blood
of the body, and there it has many children. In
those davs there would be as many as a billion —
a crab-slicll, please—as many as that crab-shell in
one man - body. We called germs micro-organisms.
JaclN
London
When a few million, or a
billion, of them were in a
man, in all the blood of a
man, he was sick. .These
germs were a disease. There
were many’ different kinds
of t hem more different
kinds than there are grains
of sand on this beach. We
knew only’ a few of the
kinds. The micro-organic
world was an invisible
world, a world we could
not see, and we knew very
little about it. Yet we did
know something. There
was the bacillus anthracis;
there was the micrococcus;
there was the Bacterium
ter mo, and the Bacterium
lactis — that’s what turns
the goat milk sour even to
this day, Hare-Lip; and
there were Schizo-nxycetes
without end. And there
were many others ...”
Here the old man launched
into a disquisition on
germs and their nature, us
ing words and phrases of
such extraordinary’ length
and meaninglessness that
the boys grinned at one
another and looked out
over the deserted ocean till
they forgot the old man was babbling on.
" But the Scarlet Death, Granser,” Edwin at last
suggested.
Granser recollected himself, and with a start tore
himself away from the rostrum of the lecture-hall,
where, to another-world audience, he had been ex
pounding the latest theory, sixty years gone, of
germs and germ-diseases.
“Yes, yes, Edwin; I had forgotten. Sometimes
the memory of the past is very strong upon me, and
1 forget that I am a dirty old man, clad in goat-skin,
wandering with my savage grandsons who are goat
herds in the primeval wilderness. ‘The fleeting sys
tems lapse like foam,’ and so lapsed our glorious,
colossal civilization. I am a Granser, a tired old
man. I belong to the tribe of Santa Rosans. I
married into that tribe. My sons and daughters
married into the Chauffeurs, the Sacramentos, and
the Palo-Altos. You, Hare-Lip, are of the Chauf
feurs. You, Edwin, are of the Sacramentos. And
you, Hoo-Hoo, are of the Palo-Altos. Your tribe
takes its name from a town that was near the seat of
another great institution of learning. It was called
Stanford University. Yes, I remember now. It is
perfectly clear. 1 was telling you of the Scarlet
Death. Where was lin my story?”
“You were telling about germs, the things you
can’t see but which make men sick,” Edwin prompted.
Copyright. 1913, by the Star Co.
I v
' T
. V
“Yes, that’s when 1 was. A man did not notice
at first when only a few of these germs got into his
body. But each germ broke in half and became two
germs, and they kept doing this very’ rapidly so that
in a short time there were many millions of them in
the body. Then the man was sick. He had a dis
ease, and the disease was named after the kind of a
germ that was in him. It might be measles, it might
be influenza, it might be yellow fever; it might be
any of thousands and thousands of kinds of diseases.
"Now this is the strange thing about these germs.
There were always new ones coming in to live in
men’s bodies. Long and long and long ago, when
there were only' a few men in the world, there were
few diseases. But as men increased and lived
closely together in great cities and civilizations, new
diseases arose, new kinds of germs entered their
bodies. Thus were countless millions and billions
of human beings killed. And the more thickly men
packed together, the more terrible were the new dis
eases that came to be. Long before my time, in the
middle ages, there was the Black Plague that swept
across Europe. It swept across Europe many times.
There was tuberculosis, that entered into men wher
ever they were thickly packed. A hundred years
before my time there was the bubonic plague. And
in Africa was the sleeping sickness. The bacteriolo
gists fought all these sicknesses and destroyed them.
The man to whom
it belonged, a quiet,
sober, but stupid
and obstinate fel
low was defending it
< op v right, 1913.
byJack Loudon