has got it fitted up here in the next cabin--and while I hold two
handles he turns it on and it runs all over me. I feel always better
for the moment--but the effect soon passes."

I looked at her with a smile.

"I should think so! Dear Miss Harland, do you really believe in that
way of administering electricity?"

"Of course I do!" she answered--"You see, it's all a question of
what they call bacteriology nowadays. Medicine is no use unless it
can kill the microbes that are eating us up inside and out. And
there's scarcely any drug that can do that. Electricity is the only
remedy. It gives the little brutes a shock;"--and the poor lady
laughed weakly--"and it kills some, but not all. It's a dreadful
scheme of creation, don't you think, to make human beings no better
than happy hunting grounds for invisible creatures to feed upon?"

"It depends on what view you take of it,"--I said, laying down my
work and trying to fix her attention, a matter which was always
difficult--"We human beings are composed of good and evil particles.
If the good are encouraged, they drive out the evil,--if the evil,
they drive out the good. It's the same with the body as the soul,--
if we encourage the health-working 'microbes' as you call them, they
will drive out disease from the human organism altogether."

She sank back on her pillow wearily.

"We can't do it,"--she said--"All the chances are against us. What's
the use of our trying to encourage 'health-working microbes'? The