“My noble friend, forgive my repartee. I’m glad, truly, that we are so lucky as to have this knowledge.” “Lucky? Then all is not fate; there is some chance, if no Providence?” “Pardon more; the bee-sting is still on thy brow. Ichabod, I can not help my feelings, which sometimes make me think that only God can tread the hidden, narrow line between stern fate and happy accident. They say the Sybil wrote her prophetic decrees upon leaves and flung them recklessly to the inconstant winds. Just so we’re in decreed courses, swirled by chance gusts.” “Yet we two are getting on well together.” “So do chance and fate; the pity is to the waif that falls between them.” “I wonder how here, in Holy Land, thou canst think of any control but Providence.” “Wonder? So do I. I’m a bundle of wonderings.” “Listen to Jabbock.” “I do, more attentively than Jabbock to me. What of it?” “Grander rivers are forgotten; why is it so remembered?” “We’re forgotten, meaner men remembered.” “This river sings through the centuries of history the song of a fugitive of pale heart, who in sheer desperation, long, long ago, seized a fleeting hope and became a prince, having power to prevail with God.” “Ah, Jacob, who worked fourteen years to win a woman. It was, I’m sure, the woman that nerved him to attempt greatness. Such a woman! Had she been like our moderns she would have jilted him, or eloped with him, before the end of one of the fourteen years.” “I’ll not tilt with thy sarcasms. It were much better to remember that he, a pigmy, the night in his soul, as that about him, black as Erebus, grappled with the mighty, unknown, unseen apparition to find he was holding Deity. The mysteries of crossing fates and chances are as open nut-bur compared to that of all weakness prevailing with Omnipotence, my good master, I think.” “But ever after that joust, Jacob was a cripple!” “Oh, but remember, as he halted on his thigh the sun rose over Penuel, ‘the place of seeing God,’ by interpretation. He was stronger for his laming!” “A very ‘Timor-lame,’ this prince of great chances and mean ways.” “Time and trial repaired Jacob’s spotted soul.” “There was much room for the mending, I do vow.” “His weightings bespeak some charity. Think; a weak mother, one designing wife, and plenty of wealth!” “Well, ’tis true, these were enough to have undone St. Anthony, if the devil had only thought to have tried them all at once upon him!” “Sir Charleroy swings back to his old bitterness toward women; did he never love one?” “No, not as a lover. I was never tried except by designing coquetries that nauseated finally.” “Perhaps, like most solitary men, thou so revered thyself by habit that there was no room for other person in thy heart.” “I never met one I deemed perfect and available.”