Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 6.pdf/387

Rh choice specimens of black mud in which his victims live. He persists in making me look through this instrument, though I would rather I did not. It seems to me a kind of impropriety when I do it. He gets innumerable things in a drop of green water, and puts it on a glass slip under the object glass, and, of course, they know nothing of the change in their condition, and go on living just as they did before they were observed. It makes me feel at times like a public moralist, or Peeping Tom of Coventry, or some such creature.

Certainly there are odd things enough in the water. Among others, certain queer green things that are neither plants nor animals. Most of the time they are plants, quiet green threads matted together, but every now and then the inside comes out of one, so to speak, and starts off with a fine red eye and a long flickering tail, to see the world. The dabbler says it's quite a usual thing among the lower plants—Algæ he calls them, for some reason—to disgorge themselves in this way and go swimming about; but it has quite upset my notions of things. If the lower plants why not the higher? It may be my abominable imagination, but since he told me about these—swarm spores, I think he called them—I don't feel nearly so safe with my geraniums as I did.

A particularly objectionable thing in these water drops the dabbler insists upon my spying at is the furious activity of everything you see in them. You look down his wretched tube, and there, bright and yellow with the lamplight in the round field of the microscope, is a perfect riot of living things. Perhaps