CHAPTER III


KARL

He was one of the men who go before. Out in the great field of
knowledge's unsurveyed territory he worked--a blazer of the trail, a
voice crying from the wilderness: "I have opened up another few feet.
You can come now a little farther." Then they would come in and take
possession, soon to become accustomed to the ground, forgetting that
only a little while before it had been impassable, scarcely thinking of
the little body of men who had opened the way for them, and now were out
farther, where again the way was blocked, trying to beat down a few more
of the barriers, open up a little more of that untrodden territory. And
only the little band itself would ever know how stony that path, how deep
the ditches, how thick and thorny the underbrush. "Why this couldn't have
been so bad," the crowd said, after it had flocked in--"strange it should
have taken so long!"

Not that the little band sought popular acclaim, or desired it.
"Heavens!" he had once exclaimed to a laboratory assistant, after a
reporter had been vainly trying to persuade him to "tell the whole story
of his work in popular vein,"--"you don't suppose medical research is
going to become a drawing-room lap dog!"

But he need not have feared. A capricious fancy might rest upon them for
the minute, but the big world which followed along behind would never
come into any complete understanding of such as they. In an age of each
man seeking what he himself can gain, how could there be understanding of