The Man Who was Running

Abstract

In the early evening time Dr Kemp was sitting in his study in the belvedere on the hill overlooking Burdock. It was a pleasant little room, with three windows — north, west, and south — and bookshelves covered with books and scientific publications, and a broad writing-table, and, under the north window, a microscope, glass slips, minute instruments, some cultures, and scattered bottles of reagents. Dr Kemp’s solar lamp* was lit, albeit the sky was still bright with the sunset light, and his blinds were up because there was no offence of peering outsiders to require them pulled down. Dr Kemp was a tall and slender young man, with flaxen hair and a moustache almost white, and the work he was upon would earn him, he hoped, the fellowship of the Royal Society,* so highly did he think of it.