I know it sounded all very brilliant and unanswerable and analogous to other things.

He hardly ever took the trouble to say all this; he was far too much interested in what he already knew, or was just on the point of finding out, to treat of these extravagant and complicated ramifications of his subject.

When he really got to know his mice and bats, as they deserved to be known, it might be possible to turn his attention to other things.

Meanwhile, it was foolish and uneconomical.

So here he lived, with a man-of-all-work and his man's wife, and daily went from strength to strength in the knowledge of Toxins.
* * * * * It was to this household that there approached, in the month of October, a small and dismal procession of three.
The doctor was first roused to a sense of what was happening as he shuffled swiftly through his little powder-closet one morning soon after breakfast, bearing in his hand the corpse of a mouse which had at last, and most disappointingly, succumbed to a severe attack of some hybrid of leprosy.