Poor Pasteur! He had been so busy trying to save the silkworm industry that he hadn’t taken time to find out what really ailed the silkworms. Glory had seduced him into becoming a mere savior--for a moment he forgot that Truth is a will o’ the wisp that can only be caught in the net of glory-scorning patient experiment.... Some silkworm raisers laughed despairing laughs at him--others attacked him bitterly; dark days were on him. He worked the harder for them, but he couldn’t find bottom. He came on broods of silkworms who fairly galloped up the twigs and proceeded to spin elegant cocoons--then at the microscope he found these beasts swarming with the tiny globules. He discovered other broods that sulked on their branches and melted away with a gassy diarrhœa and died miserably--but in these he could find no globules whatever. He became completely mixed up; he began to doubt whether the globules had anything to do with the disease. Then to make things worse, mice got into the broods of his experimental worms and made cheerful meals on them and poor Duclaux, Maillot and Gernez had to stay up by turns all night to catch the raiding mice; next morning everybody would be just started working when black clouds appeared in the West, and all of them--Madame Pasteur and the children bringing up the rear--had to scurry out to cover up the mulberry trees. In the evenings Pasteur had to settle his tired back in an armchair, to dictate answers to peeved silkworm growers who had lost everything--using his method of sorting eggs. After a series of such weary months, his instinct to do experiments, this instinct--and the Goddess of Chance--came together to save him. He pondered to himself: “I’ve at least managed to scrape together a few broods of healthy worms--if I feed these worms mulberry leaves smeared with the discharges of sick worms, will the healthy worms die?” He tried it, and the healthy worms died sure enough, but, confound it! the experiment was a fizzle again--for instead of getting covered with pepper spots and dying slowly in twenty-five days or so, as worms always do of _pébrine_--the worms of his experiment curled up and passed away in seventy-two hours. He was discouraged, he stopped his experiments; his faithful assistants worried about him--why didn’t he try the experiment over?