time to see Professor Abel emptying the last of the contents of a large 

 fire extinguisher into the middle of my precious apparatus, of which 

 there was nothing left. 



At night the heat went off in the laboratory, and it became ex- 

 tremely cold. Someone broke into the Medical School at one time, 

 after which rather luiusual precautions were taken to keep a further 

 break from occurring. These consisted in locking up the gate to the 

 high iron fence which surrounded the Medical School, and no keys 

 were given to any members of the faculty regardless of our pleas. 

 When one came over in the evenings to work, on an icy, snowy night, 

 and had to climb this high, iron fence with its arrow-shaped spikes, 

 then feel one's way into the basement in utter darkness, locate the 

 main switch of the building, turn that on, and then climb three 

 flights of stairs in the dark on account of an economical lighting 

 system which had been developed, it often took some time to quiet 

 one's resentment against the powers that had developed such plans, 

 especially those who did not have to climb the fence. 



In spite of all this, the laboratory was one of the finest to work in 

 that I have ever seen. Everything was informal, and Professor Abel 

 had that very rare faculty of being willing to see a change made in 

 anything at any time. Once while I was there, a plan was developed 

 to move the Department of Pharmacology to the new Himterian 

 Building, which to my mind would have ruined the spirit of the 

 Medical School, as it would have separated biochemistry, physiology, 

 and pharmacology, but when this was suggested to Dr. Abel, he was 

 perfectly willing to make the change if others thought it best for the 

 School, in spite of the fact that it would upset his work for a consider- 

 able length of time. 



If the Professor was a trifle thoughtless about the comforts of his 

 assistants, he was eqtially thoughtless about his own. For instance, 

 he had no telephone in his room, and for a long time, in order to use 

 one, he had to come out into the hallway and squeeze into a horribly 

 small closet which was a sort of dump for dirty laboratory coats, the 

 janitors' shoes, etc. For a great many years he had no secretary, and 

 it took a lot of persuading in order to get him to take on even a half- 

 time one. The Professor immediately installed a telephone on her 

 desk, but he himself still had to go through Dr. Marshall's laboratory, 

 out into the hall, and carry on his telephone conversation in this 

 stuffy closet. As it became annoying for the secretary to go constantly 

 to the Professor's room and call him to the telephone, she installed a 

 buzzer on his desk so that it was only necessary for her to press a but- 



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