wasn't fit to undo the latchet of Simpson's shoes. Why! have you never
heard the story of Simpson and the giddy goat?"

"The goat?" said the sub.

"Yes, the goat. Useful animal the goat, if a trifle capricious. It was
like this. Old Simpson, who's got a head on his shoulders big enough to
do all the thinking for the Royal College of Physicians, and ditto of
Surgeons, with a good few ideas left over for the R.A.M.C., determined
to get to the bottom of Mediterranean Fever--a nasty complaint, which
had worried the Malta garrison considerably. Now the first thing to do
when you are on the track of a fever is, as they say in the children's
picture-books, 'Puzzle: Find the Microbe.' It occurred to Simpson to
suspect the goat. Why? Well, because he'd noticed that goat's milk was
drunk in Malta and Egypt. So he began to study the geographical
distribution of the goat with the zeal of an anthropologist localising
dolicocephalic and brachycephalic races. He found eventually that
wherever you could 'place' a goat you would find the fever. Wherefore he
took some goat's milk and cultivated it assiduously in an alluring
medium of Glucose-nutrose-peptone-litmus."

"Dot and carry one. Please repeat," I interjected.

"Glucose-nutrose-peptone-litmus," repeated the Major.

"Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar-man,
thief," soliloquised the subaltern, who was brightening up.

"Quite so," said the Major with a benignant glance. "Well, he then got a
culture."