gh his mind.

He had been fighting for months, and losing ground; but this was the first
absolute check that his faith had received. He staggered under it, half
wonderingly, like a man who has been hit by an unseen hand and looks around
to see whence the blow came. Why should it come now? He looked back along
the years. Not a breath of disparagement had touched the Cure's fair
repute. His files in London were full of testimonials honorably acquired.
Some of these, from lowly folk, were touching in their simple gratitude. It
is true that his manager suggested that the authors had sent them in the
hope of gain and of seeing their photographs in the halfpenny papers. But
his manager, Shuttleworth, was a notorious and dismal cynic who believed in
nothing save the commercial value of the Cure. Letters had come with
coroneted flaps to the envelopes. The writers certainly hoped neither for
gain nor for odd notoriety. He had never paid a fee for a testimonial
throughout his career; every one that he printed was genuine and
unsolicited. He had been hailed as the Friend of Humanity by all sorts and
conditions of men. Why suddenly should he be branded as a dealer in
pestilence?

His thought wandered back to the beginning of things. He saw himself in the
chemist's shop in Bury Saint Edmunds--a little shop in a little town, too
small, he felt, for the great unknown something within him that was craving
for expansion. The dull making up of prescriptions, the selling of tooth
powder and babies' feeding bottles--the deadly mechanical routine--he
remembered the daily revolt against it all. He remembered his discovery of
the old herbalists; his delight in their quaint language; the remedies so
extraordinary and yet so simple; his first idea of combining these with the
orthodox drugs of the British Pharmacopoeia; his experiments; his talks
with an aged man who kept a dingy little shop of herbs on the outskirts of
the town, also called a pestilential fellow by the medical faculty of the
district, but a learned ancient all the same, who knew the qualities of
every herb that grew, and with some reeking mess of pulp was said to have
cured an old woman's malignant ulcer given up as incurable by the faculty.
He remembered the night when the old man, grateful for the lad's interest
in his learning, gave him under vows of secrecy the recipe of this healing
emulsion, which was to become the basis of Sypher's Cure. In those days his
loneliness was