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 cheered by a bulldog, an ugly, faithful beast whom he called Barabbas--he sighed to think how many Barabbases had lived and died since then--and who, contracting mange, became the _corpus vile_ of many experiments--first with the old man's emulsion, then with the emulsion mixed with other drugs, all bound together in pure animal fat, until at last he found a mixture which to his joy made the sores heal and the skin harden and the hair sprout and Barabbas grow sleek as a swell mobsman in affluent circumstances.