True, every fine day Curtiss would pick up his master and carry him carefully downstairs to where his chair had been carried down beforehand and was awaiting him. Then he would wheel Poirot out into the garden and select a spot that was free from draughts. On other days, when the weather was not propitious, he would be carried to the drawing room.

Wherever he might be, someone or other was sure to come and sit with him and talk, but this was not the same thing as if Poirot could have selected for himself his partner in the tête-à-tête. He could no longer single out the person he wanted to talk to.

On the day after my arrival I was taken by Franklin to an old studio in the garden which had been fitted up in a rough-and-ready fashion for scientific purposes. Let me make clear here and now that I myself have not got the scientific mind. In my account of Dr. Franklin's work I shall probably use all the wrong terms and arouse the scorn of those properly instructed in such matters. As far as I, a mere layman, could make out, Franklin was experimenting with various alkaloids derived from the Calabar bean, Physostigma venenosum. I understood more after a conversation which took place one day between Franklin and Poirot. Judith, who tried to instruct me, was, as is customary with the earnest young, almost impossibly technical. She referred learnedly to the alkaloids physostigmine, eserine, physovenine, and geneserine, and then proceeded to a most impossible-sounding substance, prostigmin or the demethylcarbonic ester of 3-hydroxyphenyl trimethyl lammonum, etc., etc., and a good deal more which, it appeared, was the same thing, only differently arrived at! It was all, at any rate, double Dutch to me, and I aroused Judith's contempt by asking what good all this was likely to do to mankind? There is no question that annoys your true scientist more. Judith at once threw me a scornful glance and embarked on another lengthy and learned explanation. The upshot of it was, so I gathered, that certain obscure tribes of West African natives had shown a remarkable immunity to an equally obscure, though deadly disease called, as far as I remember, Jordanitis - a certain enthusiastic Dr. Jordan having originally tracked it down. It was an extremely rare tropical ailment, which had been, on one or two occasions, contracted by white people, with fatal results.

I risked inflaming Judith's rage by remarking that it would be more sensible to find some drug that would counteract the aftereffects of measles!

With pity and scorn Judith made it clear to me that it was not the benefaction of the human race, but the enlargement of human knowledge, that was the only goal worthy of attainment.

I looked at some slides through the microscope, studied some photographs of West African natives (really quite entertaining!), caught the eye of a soporific rat in a cage and hurried out again into the air.