and he said she might respect his ideas, and she said not if they were

smelly she wouldn't, and then he gave way completely and said--in spite

of the classical remarks of Huxley upon the subject--a bad word. Not a

very bad word it was, but bad enough.

And after that she was greatly offended and had to be apologised to, and

the prospect of ever trying the Food of the Gods upon tadpoles in their

flat at any rate vanished completely in the apology.

So Bensington had to consider some other way of carrying out these

experiments in feeding that would be necessary to demonstrate his

discovery, so soon as he had his substance isolated and prepared. For

some days he meditated upon the possibility of boarding out his tadpoles

with some trustworthy person, and then the chance sight of the phrase in

a newspaper turned his thoughts to an Experimental Farm.

And chicks. Directly he thought of it, he thought of it as a poultry

farm. He was suddenly taken with a vision of wildly growing chicks. He

conceived a picture of coops and runs, outsize and still more outsize

coops, and runs progressively larger. Chicks are so accessible, so

easily fed and observed, so much drier to handle and measure, that for

his purpose tadpoles seemed to him now, in comparison with them, quite

wild and uncontrollable beasts. He was quite puzzled to understand why

he had not thought of chicks instead of tadpoles from the beginning.

Among other things it would have saved all this trouble with his cousin

Jane. And when he suggested this to Redwood, Redwood quite agreed with

The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth