BIOLOGICAL LABORATORY AT NAPLES 



exposing names with which he has long been familiar. 

 He understands that the bearers of the names are at 

 work within the designated rooms, but no one offers 

 to introduce him to them, and for some time, perhaps, 

 he does not so much as see them, nor would he recog- 

 nize them if he did. He feels strange and isolated in 

 the midst of this stronghold of his profession. 



But soon this feeling leaves him. He begins to 

 meet his fellow-workers casually here and there in 

 the hallways, at the distributing- tanks, in the library. 

 There are no formal gatherings, and there are some 

 workers who never seem to affiliate at all with the 

 others ; but in the long-run, here as elsewhere, kindred 

 spirits find one another out; and even the unsocial 

 ones take their share, whether or no, in the indefinable 

 but very sensible influence of massed numbers. Pres- 

 ently some one suggests to the new-comer that he join 

 some of the others of a Wednesday or Saturday evening, 

 at a rendezvous where a number of them meet regu- 

 larly. He goes, under escort of his sponsor, and is 

 guided through one of those narrow, dark, hill-side 

 streets of Naples where he would hardly feel secure to 

 go alone, to a little wine-shop in what seems a veritable 

 dungeon a place which, if a stranger in Naples, he 

 would never even remotely think of entering. But 

 there he finds his confreres of the laboratory gathered 

 about a long table, with the most conglomerate groups 

 of Neapolitans of a seemingly doubtful class at their 

 elbows. Each biologist has a caraffa of light wine on 

 the table before him, and all are smoking. And, staid 

 men of science that they are, they are chattering away 

 on trivial topics with the animation of a company of 



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