YOU would hardly think that a big, bare room, with rows of battered benches and shelves and tables littered with all sorts of queer-looking jars and bottles, could be a hiding-place for fairies. Yet Marie's father, who was one of the wise men of Warsaw, said they were always to be found there.

"Yes, little daughter," he said, "the fairies you may chance to meet with in the woods, peeping from behind trees and sleeping in flowers, are a tricksy, uncertain sort. The real fairies, who do things, are to be found in my dusty laboratory. They are the true wonder-workers, and there you may really catch them at work and learn some of their secrets."

"But, Father, wouldn't the fairies like it better if it wasn't quite so dusty there?" asked the child.

"No doubt of it," replied the professor. "We need one fairy more to put us to rights."

At a time when most little girls are playing with dolls, Marie was playing "fairy" in the big classroom, dusting the tables and shelves, and washing the glass tubes and other things that her father used as he talked to his students. "I think we might see the fairies better if I make all these glasses clear and shiny," said Marie.

"Can I trust your little fingers not to let things fall?" asked her father. "Remember, my funny glasses are precious. It might cost us a dinner if you should let one slip."

The professor soon found that his little daughter never let anything slip—either the things he used or the things he said. "Such a wise little fairy and such a busy one!" he would say. "I don't know how we could do our work without her."

If Professor Ladislaus Sklodowski had not loved his laboratory teaching above all else, he would have known that he was overworked. As it was, he counted himself fortunate in being able to serve Truth and to enlist others in her service. For the professor's zeal was of the kind that kindles enthusiasm. If you had seen the faces of those Polish students as they hung on his words and watched breathlessly the result of an experiment, you would have known that they, too, believed in the wonder-working fairies.

It seems as if the Polish people have a greater love and understanding of the unseen powers of the world than is given to many other nations. If you read the story of Poland's tragic struggles against foes within and without until, finally, the stronger surrounding countries—Germany, Austria, and Russia—divided her territory as spoil among themselves and she ceased to exist as a distinct nation, you will understand why her children have sought refuge in the things of the spirit. They have in a wonderful degree the courage that rises above the most unfriendly circumstances and says:

Some of them, like Chopin and Paderewski, have found a new world in music; others have found it in poetry and romance; and still others in science. The child who dreamed of fairies in her father's classroom was to discover the greatest marvel of modern science—a discovery that opened up a new world to the masters of physics and chemistry of our day.

Marie's mother, who had herself been a teacher, died when the child was very small; and so it happened that the busy father had to take sole care of her and make the laboratory do duty as nursery and playroom. It was not strange that the bright, thoughtful little girl learned to love the things that were so dear to her father's heart. Would he not rather buy things for his work than have meat for dinner? Did he not wear the same shabby kaftan (the full Russian top-coat that looks like a dressing-gown) year after year in order that he might have material for important experiments? Truth was, indeed, more than meat and the love of learning more than raiment in that home, and the little daughter drank in his enthusiasm with the queer laboratory smells which were her native air and the breath of life to her. The time came when the child had to leave this nursery to enter school, but always, when the day's session was over, she went directly to that other school where she listened fascinated to all her father taught about the wonders of the inner world of atoms and the mysterious forces that make the visible world in which we live. She still believed in fairies,—oh, yes!—but now she knew their names. There were the rainbow fairies—light-waves, that make all the colors we see,—and many more our eyes are not able to discover, but which we can capture by interesting experiments. There were sound-waves, too, and the marvelous forces we call electricity, magnetism, and gravitation. When she was nine years old, it was second nature to care for her father's batteries, beakers, and retorts, and to help prepare the apparatus that was to be used in the demonstrations of the coming day. The students marveled at the child's skill and knowledge, and called her with admiring affection "professorowna," (daughter-professor).

There was a world besides the wonderland of the laboratory, of which Marie was soon aware. This was the world of fear, where the powers of Russia ruled. In 1861 the Poles had made a vain attempt to win their independence, and when Marie was a little girl (she was born in 1867), the authorities tried to stamp out any further sparks of possible rebellion by adopting unusually harsh measures. It was a crime to speak the Polish language in the schools and to talk of the old, happy days when Poland was a nation. If any one was even suspected of looking forward to a better time when the people would not be persecuted by the police or forced to bribe unprincipled officials for a chance to conduct their business without interference, he was carried off to the cruel, yellow-walled prison near the citadel, and perhaps sent to a life of exile in Siberia. Since knowledge means independent thought and capacity for leadership, the high schools and universities were particularly under suspicion. Years afterward, when Marie spoke of this reign of terror, her eyes flashed and her lips were set in a thin white line. Time did not make the memory less vivid.

"Every corridor of my father's school had finger-posts pointing to Siberia!" she declared dramatically.

When Marie was sixteen, she graduated from the "gymnasium" for girls, receiving a gold medal for excellence in mathematics and sciences. In Russia, as in Germany, the gymnasium corresponds to our high school, but also covers some of the work of the first two years of college. The name gymnasium signifies a place where the mind is exercised and made strong in preparation for the work of the universities.

The position as governess to the daughters of a Russian nobleman was offered to the brilliant girl with the sweet, serious eyes and gentle voice. As it meant independence and a chance to travel and learn the ways of the world, Marie agreed to undertake the work.

Now, for the first time in her life, the young Polish girl knew work that was not a labor of love. Her pupils cared nothing for the things that meant everything to her. How they loved luxury and show and gay chatter! How indifferent they were to truth that would make the world wiser and happier. "How strangely you look, Mademoiselle Marie," said the little Countess Olga one day, in the midst of her French lesson. "Your eyes seem to see things far away."

Marie was truly looking past her pupils, past the rich apartment, beyond Russia, into the great world of opportunity for all earnest workers. She had overheard something about another plot among the students of Warsaw, and knew that some of her father's pupils had been put under arrest.

"Suppose they should try to make me testify against my friends," said the girl to herself. "I must leave Russia at once. My savings will surely take me to Paris, and there I may get a place as helper in one of the big laboratories, where I can learn as I work."

The eyes that had been dark with fear an instant before became bright with hope. Eagerly she planned a disguise and a way to slip off the very next night while the household was in the midst of the excitement of a masquerade ball.

Everything went well, and in due time she found her trembling self and her slender possessions safely stowed away on a train that was moving rapidly toward the frontier and freedom. No one gave a second thought to the little elderly woman with gray hair and spectacles who sat staring out of the window of her compartment at the fields and trees rushing by in the darkness and the starry heavens that the train seemed to carry with it. Her plain, black dress and veil seemed those of a self-respecting, upper-class servant, who was perhaps going to the bedside of a dying son.

"I feel almost as old as I look," Marie was saying to herself. "But how can a girl who is all alone in the world, with no one to know what happens to her, help feeling old? Down in my heart, though, I know that life is just beginning. There is something waiting for me beyond the blackness—something that needs just little me."

It was a wonderful relief when the solitary journey was over and the elderly disguise laid aside. "Shall I ever feel really young again?" said the girl, who was not quite twenty-four. But not for a moment did she doubt that there was work waiting for her in the big, unexplored world. During those early days in Paris, Marie often had reason to be grateful for the plain living of her childhood that had made her independent of creature comforts. Now she knew actual want in her cold garret, furnished only with a cot and chair, like a hermit's cell. She lived, too, on hermit's fare—black bread and milk. But even when it was so cold that the milk was frozen,—cold comfort, indeed!—the fire of her enthusiasm knew no chill. Day after day she walked from laboratory to laboratory begging to be given a chance as assistant, but always with the same result. It was man's work; why did she not look for a place in a milliner's shop?

One day she renewed her appeal to Professor Lippman in the Sorbonne research laboratories. Something in the still, pale face and deep-set, earnest eyes caught the attention of the busy man. Perhaps this strange, determined girl was starving! And besides, the crucibles and test-tubes were truly in sad need of attention. Grudgingly he bade her clean the various accessories and care for the furnace. Her deftness and skill in handling the materials, and a practical suggestion that proved of value in an important experiment, attracted the favorable notice of the professor. He realized that the slight girl with the foreign look and accent, whom he had taken in out of an impulse of pity, was likely to become one of his most valuable helpers.

A new day dawned for the ambitious young woman. While supporting herself by her laboratory work, she completed in two years the university course for a degree in mathematics, and, two years later, she won a second degree in physics and chemistry. In the meantime her enthusiasm for science and her undaunted courage in the face of difficulties and discouragements attracted the admiration of a fellow-worker, Pierre Curie, one of the most promising of the younger professors.

"I love you, and we both love the same things," he said one day. "Would it not be happier to live and work together than alone?"

And so began that wonderful partnership of two great scientists, whose hard work and heroic struggle, crowned at last by brilliant success, has been an inspiration to earnest workers the world over.

Madame Curie set up a little laboratory in their apartment, and toiled over her experiments at all hours. Her baby daughter was often bathed and dressed in this workroom among the test-tubes and the interesting fumes of advanced research.

"Irene is as happy in the atmosphere of science as her mother was," said Madame Curie to one of her husband's brother-professors who seemed surprised to find a crowing infant in a laboratory. "And if I could afford the best possible nurse, she could not take my place! For my baby and I know the joy of living and growing together with those we love."

What was the problem that the mother was working over even while she sewed for her little girl, or rocked her to sleep to the gentle crooning of an old Polish folk-song whose melody Chopin has wrought into one of his tenderest nocturnes?

The child who used to delight in experiments with light-waves in her father's laboratory, was interested in the strange glow which Prof. Becquerel had found that the substance known as uranium gave off spontaneously. Like the X-rays, this light passes through wood and other bodies opaque to sunlight. Madame Curie became deeply interested in the problem of the nature of the Becquerel rays and their wonderful properties, such as that of making the air a conductor for electricity. One day she discovered that pitchblende, the black mineral from which uranium is extracted, was more radioactive (that is, it gave off more powerful rays) than the isolated substance itself, and she came to the conclusion that there was some other element in the ore which, could it be extracted, would prove more valuable than uranium.

With infinite patience and the skill of highly trained specialists in both physics and chemistry, Madame Curie and her husband worked to obtain this unknown substance. At times Pierre Curie all but lost heart at the seemingly insurmountable obstacles in the way. "It cannot be done!" he exclaimed one day, with a groan. "Truly, 'Nature has buried Truth deep in the bottom of the sea.'" "But man can dive, cher ami," said his wife, with a heartening smile. "Think of the joy when one comes up at last with the pearl—the pearl of truth!"

At last their toil was rewarded, and two new elements were separated from pitchblende—polonium, so named by Madame Curie in honor of her native Poland, and radium, the most marvelous of all radioactive substances. A tiny pinch of radium, which is a grayish white powder not unlike coarse salt in appearance, gives out a strange glow something like that of fireflies, but bright enough to read by. Moreover, light and heat are radiated by this magic element with no apparent waste of its own amount or energy. Radium can also make some other substances, diamonds for instance, shine with a light like its own, and it makes the air a conductor of electricity. Its weird glow passes through bone almost as readily as through tissue-paper or through flesh, and it even penetrates an inch-thick iron plate.

The Curies now woke to find not only Paris but the world ringing with the fame of their discovery. The modest workers wanted nothing, however, but the chance to go on with their research. You know how Tennyson makes the aged Ulysses look forward even at the end of his life to one more last voyage. The type of the unconquerable human soul that ever presses on to fresh achievement, he says:

So it was with Pierre Curie and his wife. Their famous accomplishment opened a new world of interesting possibilities, a world which they longed above all things to explore.

Their one trouble was the difficulty of procuring enough of the precious element they had discovered to go on with their experiments. Because radium is not only rare, but also exceedingly hard to extract from the ore, it is a hundred times more precious than pure gold. It is said that five tons of pitchblende were treated before a trifling pinch of the magic powder was secured. It would take over two thousand tons of the mineral to produce a pound of radium. Moreover, it was not easy to secure the ore, as practically all the known mines were in Austria, and those in control wanted to profit as much as possible by this chance.

"It does seem as if people might not stand in the way of our obtaining the necessary material to go on with our work," lamented Pierre Curie. "What we discover belongs to the world—to any one who can use it."

"We have passed other lions in the way. This, too, we shall pass," said Madame Curie, quietly.

They lived in a tiny house in an obscure suburb of Paris, giving all that they possessed—the modest income gained from teaching and lecturing, their share of the Nobel prize of $40,000, which, in 1903, was divided between them and Professor Becquerel, together with all their time and all their skill and knowledge, to their work.

For recreation they went for walks in the country with little Irene, often stopping for dinner at quaint inns among the trees. On one such evening, when Dr. Curie had just declined the decoration of the Legion of Honor, because it had "no bearing on his work," his small daughter climbed on his knee and slipped a red geranium into his buttonhole, saying, with comical solemnity: "You are now decorated with the Legion of Honor. Pray, Monsieur, what do you intend to do about it?"

"I like this emblem much better than a glittering star on a bit of red ribbon, and I love the hand that put it there," replied the father, his face lighting up with one of his rare smiles. "In this case I make no objection."

Other honors, which meant increased opportunity for work, were quietly accepted. Pierre Curie was elected to the French Academy—the greatest honor his country can bestow on her men of genius and achievement. Madame Curie received the degree of Doctor of Physical Science, and—a distinction shared with no other woman—the position of special lecturer at the Sorbonne, in Paris.

One day in 1906, when Dr. Curie, his mind intent on an absorbing problem, was absent-mindedly hurrying across a wet street, he slipped and fell under a passing truck and was instantly killed. When they attempted to break the news to Madame Curie by telling her that her husband had been hurt in an accident, she looked past them with a white, set face, and repeated over and over to herself, as if trying to get her bearings in the new existence that stretched blackly before her, "Pierre is dead; Pierre is dead."

Now, as on that night when she was leaving Russia for an unknown world, she saw a gleam in the blackness—there was work to be done! There was something waiting in the shadowy future for her, something that she alone could do. As on that other night, she found her lips shaping the words: "The big world has need of little me. But oh, it will be hard now to work alone!" Then her eyes fell on her two little girls (Irene was now eight years old and baby Eve was three), who were standing quietly near with big, wondering eyes fixed on their mother's strange face.

"Forgive me, darlings!" she cried, gathering her children into her arms. "We must try hard to go on with the work Father loved. Together is a magic word for us still, little daughters!"

Everybody wondered at the courage and quiet power with which Madame Curie went out to meet her new life. She succeeded to her husband's professorship, and carried on his special lines of investigation as well as her own. The value of her work to science and to humanity may be indicated by the fact that in 1911 the Nobel prize was again awarded to her—the only time it has ever been given more than once to the same person.

At home, she tried to be father as well as mother. She took the children for walks in the evening, and while she sewed on their dresses and knitted them mittens and mufflers, she told them stories of the wonderland of science.

"Why do you take time to write down everything you do?" asked Eve one day, as she looked over her mother's shoulder at the neat note-book in which the world-famous scientist was summing up the work of the day.

"Why does a seaman keep a log, dearie?" the mother questioned with a smile. "A laboratory is just like a ship, and I want things shipshape. Every day with me is like a voyage—a voyage of discovery."

"But why do you put question marks everywhere, Mother!" persisted the child. It was true that the pages fairly bristled with interrogation points. Madame Curie laughed as if she had never noticed this before. "It is good to have an inquiring mind, child," she said. "I am like my children; I love to ask questions. And when one gets an answer,—when you really discover something,—it only leads to more questions; and so we go on from one thing to another."

When Madame Curie was asked on one occasion to what she attributed her success, she replied, without hesitation: "To my excellent training: first, under my father, who taught me to wonder and to test; second, under my husband, who understood and encouraged me; and third, under my children, who question me!"

It is the day of one of Madame Curie's lectures. The dignified halls of the university are a-flutter with many visitors from the world of wealth and fashion. There, too, are distinguished scientists from abroad, among whom are Lord Kelvin, Sir Oliver Lodge, and Sir William Ramsay. The President of France and his wife enter with royal guests, Don Carlos and Queen AmÉlie of Portugal, and the Shah of Persia. The plodding students and the sober men of learning, ranged about the hall, blink at the brilliant company like owls suddenly brought into the sunlight.

At a given moment the hum of conversation dies away and the assemblage rises to its feet as a little black-robed figure steps in and stands before them on the platform. There is an instant's stillness,—a hush of indrawn breath you can almost hear,—and then the audience gives expression to its enthusiasm in a sudden roar of applause. The little woman lifts up her hand pleadingly. All is still again and she begins to speak.

She is slight, almost pathetically frail, this queen of science. You feel as if all her life had gone into her work. Her face is pale, and her hair is only a shadow above her serious brow. But the deep-set eyes glow, and the quiet voice somehow holds the attention of those least concerned with the problems of advanced physics.

Bank and wealth mean nothing to this little black-robed professor. It is said that when she was requested by the president to give a special demonstration of radium and its marvels before the Shah of Persia, she amazed his Serene Highness by showing much more concern for her tiny tube of white powder than for his distinguished favor. When the royal guest, who had never felt any particular need of exercising self-control, saw the uncanny light that was able to pass through plates of iron, he gave a startled exclamation and made a sudden movement that tipped over the scientist's material. Now it was the Lady Professor's turn to be alarmed. To pacify her, the Shah held out a costly ring from his royal finger, but this extraordinary woman with the pale face paid not the slightest attention; she could not be bribed to forget the peril of her precious radium. It is to be doubted if the eastern potentate had ever before been treated with such scant ceremony.

In 1911, Madame Curie's name was proposed for election to the Academy of Sciences. While it was admitted that her rivals for the vacancy were below her in merit, she failed of being elected by two votes. There was a general protest, since it was felt that service of the first order had gone unrecognized merely because the candidate happened to be a woman. It was stated, however, that Madame Curie was not rejected for this reason, but because it was thought wise to appoint to that vacancy Professor Branly, who had given Marconi valuable aid in his invention of wireless telegraphy, and who, since he was then an old man, would probably not have another chance for the honor. As Madame Curie, on the other hand, was only forty-three, she could well wait for another vacancy.

Since the outbreak of the present war the world has heard nothing new of the work of the Heroine of Radium. We do not doubt, however, that like all the women of France and all her men of science, she is giving her strength and knowledge to the utmost in the service of her adopted country. But we know, also, that just as surely she is seeing the pure light of truth shining through the blackness, and that she is "following the gleam." When the clouds of war shall have cleared away, we may see that her labors now, as in the past, have not only been of service to her country, but also to humanity. For Truth knows no boundaries of nation or race, and he who serves Truth serves all men.