Once more he started out to show all of France how science could save money for her industry; he packed up boxes of glassware and an eager assistant, Duclaux, and bustled off to Arbois, his old home--he hurried off up there to study the diseases of wine--to save the imperiled wine industry. He set up his laboratory in what had been an old café and instead of gas burners he had to be satisfied with an open charcoal brazier that the enthusiastic Duclaux kept glowing with a pair of bellows; from time to time Duclaux would scamper across to the town pump for water; their clumsy apparatus was made by the village carpenter and tinsmith. Pasteur rushed around to his friends of long ago and begged bottles of wine, bitter wine, ropy wine, oily wine; he knew from his old researches that it was yeasts that changed grapejuice into wine--he felt certain that it must be some other wee microscopic being that made wines go bad. Sure enough! When he turned his lens on to ropy wines he found them swarming with very tiny curious microbes hitched together like strings of beads; he found the bottles of bitter wine infested with another kind of beast and the kegs of turned wine by still another. Then he called the winegrowers and the merchants of the region together and proceeded to show them magic. “Bring me a half dozen bottles of wine that has gone bad with different sicknesses,” he asked them. “Do not tell me what is wrong with them, and I’ll tell you what ails them without tasting them.” The winegrowers didn’t believe him; among each other they snickered at him as they went to fetch the bottles of sick wine; they laughed at the fantastic machinery in the old café; they took Pasteur for some kind of earnest lunatic. They planned to fool him and brought him bottles of perfectly good wine among the sick ones. Then he set about flabbergasting them! With a slender glass tube he sucked a drop of wine out of a bottle and put it between two little slips of glass before his microscope. The wine raisers nudged each other and winked French winks of humorous common sense, while Pasteur sat hunched over his microscope, and they became more merry as minutes passed.... Suddenly he looked at them and said: “There is nothing the matter with this wine--give it to the taster--let him see if I’m right.” The taster did his tasting, then puckered up his purple nose and admitted that Pasteur was correct; and so it went through a long row of bottles--when Pasteur looked up from his microscopes and prophesied: “Bitter wine”--it turned out to be bitter; and when he foretold that the next sample was ropy, the taster acknowledged that ropy was right! The wine raisers mumbled their thanks and lifted their hats to him as they left. “We don’t get the way he does this--but he is a very clever man, very, very clever,” they muttered. That is much for a peasant Frenchman to admit....