Now Mr. Mole's attentions were not wholly caused by the tender passion. He had long had dark and deep suspicion of his chief. Scientific secrets were concealed from him, of that he was sure. He was carrying out a long course of physiological experiment, the object of which Mr. Mole was unable to fathom, and he was not the sort of man to be kept out of a good thing willingly. A great number of animals had been used up for some unexplained reasons, and always at night; some at the hospital laboratory, and others, as he had reason to suspect, at Crowe's own home. Numerous square cases had from time to time been sent in from Odessa and other Russian towns. These were never opened in Mr. Mole's presence, but were always reserved till the nights when Mr. Crowe worked alone. Never had he succeeded in finding even one of the empty cases. What could Mr. Crowe want from Russia which must be kept so very secret?
For months this question had agitated the breast of our inquisitive little physiologist, and he seemed no nearer its solution than when he first set his brains to work upon it. One day, however, he picked up under his employer's desk a small pamphlet printed in characters of a language with which he was quite unfamiliar. It was something like Greek, but he knew it was not that. However, he thought it was good enough to take pains about, so he went to an office in Fleet Street which advertised itself as willing to translate anything into anything in the world of human speech. He found that the pamphlet in question was in the Russian language, and was a treatise on the poison of mushrooms written by a professor of toxicology at Moscow. It gave a very curious account of the symptoms produced in various mammals by the administration of the active principles of several poisonous fungi, and urged that they should be tried by some doctor, having proper convenience for doing so, on hospital patients, with a view to the investigation of the symptoms produced by them on human beings. Mr. Mole paid his translation fee and preserved his notes for future use, restoring the Russian pamphlet to the laboratory from which he had taken it.
He was still puzzled at the secrecy shown by Mr. Crowe, having often before assisted him in the investigation of the action of the most deadly and obscure vegetable poisons, which were always tried on some of the unfortunate patients with more or less valuable results.