Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/148

 urban viewpoint, but the rustic and physiological one, theorizing neither in terms of the mere mechano-morphism of the physicists and the chemists nor of the puzzled mysticism of the vitalist philosophers as yet befogged by their urban environment or bewildered by reaction from it"—whatever that may mean.

It meant to Jeddes, and to the reviewer, that "Pasteur was not the last thinking peasant." And the name of Pasteur put me to the blush. Had we been looking down, hi ignorant superiority from Wauchock Hill, upon the profound experiments of a new Pasteur? Apparently we had.

I carried the review to Mrs. Murdock. She had already seen it. She was her husband's amanuensis, and kept the daily record of his experiments, and wrote whatever was procured from him for publication. She acted as his interpreter, at our meeting, very gracefully; and what she interpreted was chiefly his silence. In a Mayflower arm-chair beside the open door, with his garden behind him, he sat smiling amiably at us, unembarrassed, but as quiet as a sea-captain, his feet planted firmly on the floor in leather slippers, his hands resting on the chair-arms, his trowel in one hand and his haycock hat in the other, his bony head and shoulders as gravely immovable as a mountain, with an air about him of something elemental, sun-browned,