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These successes made Pasteur drunk with confidence in his method of experiment; he began to dream impossible gaudy dreams—of immense discoveries and super-Napoleonic microbe huntings—and he did more than brood alone over these dreams; he put them into speeches and preached them. He became, in a word, a new John the Baptist of the religion of the Germ Theory, but unlike the unlucky Baptist, Pasteur was a forerunner who lived to see at least some of his prophecies come true.

Then for a short time he worked quietly in his laboratory in Paris—there was nothing for him to save just then—until one day in 1865 Fate came to his door and knocked. Fate in the guise of his old professor, Dumas, called on him and asked him to change himself from a man of science into a silkworm doctor. "What's wrong with silkworms? I did not know that they ever had diseases—I know nothing at all about silkworms—what's more, I have never even seen one!" protested Pasteur.

"The silk country of the South is my native country," answered Dumas. "I've just come back from there—it is terrible—I cannot sleep nights for thinking of it, my poor country, my village of Alais. . . . This country that used to be rich, that used to be gay with mulberry trees which my people used to call the Golden Tree—this country is desolate now. The lovely terraces are going to ruin—the people, they are my people, they are starving. . . ." Tears were in his voice.

Anything but a respecter of persons, Pasteur who loved and respected himself above all men, had always kept a touching reverence for Dumas. He must help his sad old professor! But how? It is doubtful at this time if Pasteur could have told a silkworm from an angle worm! Indeed, a little later, when he was first given a cocoon to examine, he held it up to his ear, shook it, and cried: "Why, there is something inside