few moments before he would bring up some topic of conversation 

 which was always interesting. He had an enormous amount of infor- 

 mation about matters relating to his work as well as to the work of 

 others, and he was always very much interested in historical matters, 

 particularly in relation to the war. When we had such visitors as 

 Sir Gowland Hopkins, Sir Henry Dale, Barger, and others who were 

 working on biochemical problems, they would sit at the table half the 

 afternoon going to the very bottom of these problems. But when 

 we had visitors of other types who could not discuss fundamentals, 

 the conversation soon lagged, and it became obvious that the Professor 

 was anxious to get back to work. 



There was nothing formal about these affairs or about the labora- 

 tory. We were usually surroiuided by several dogs in a state of anes- 

 thesia due to paraldehyde, whose ureters had been cannulated by 

 Dr. Marshall for his kidney experiments. The odor from the paral- 

 dehyde as well as the dogs was not too pleasing, but this made no 

 difference. There were more roaches in that laboratory than in any 

 place that I have ever been in, and I have been in bad ones. Several 

 times we tried concerted gas attacks with sprays on these roaches and 

 collected several buckets of them, but they came back almost at once. 

 Then we tried putting the legs of the lunch table in tin cans of kero- 

 sene to see if that would keep the roaches out of our food, but even 

 this was none too successful. The Professor always knocked his chair 

 on the floor and shook out his coffee cup before sitting down. For 

 years the coffee cups were Cross and Blackwell crockery marmalade 

 jars. One day I noticed the Professor wiping his knife back and 

 forth over the oilcloth on the table in a dreamy sort of way when he 

 suddenly called out, "Charlie, Charlie, what is this? Haven't we 

 oot a new oilcloth?" When Charlie answered in the affirmative, he 

 said in his far-off manner, "I thought so. I couldn't hear any roaches 

 crackle underneath it." The roaches ate the backs off our books. 

 They were so thick that anyone who had been in the laboratory any 

 length of time automatically stepped back when opening a door to 

 allow the roaches to fall, and we all turned the inside bands of our hats 

 down before leaving for the night and shook the roaches out. I 

 tried to clean the laboratory once and found that the drawers re- 

 semljled the streets of Pompeii. They contained layers of papers and 

 old notebooks between which rats had died, had become desiccated, 

 and were flattened out by the accumulating material. By such excava- 

 tions it was almost possible to tell the order in which Dr. Abel's as- 

 sistants had come to the laboratory. It was only after a Spanish 



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