The point of view assumed by a Prophet is of little consequence compared with what he sees. Some say, back-sight is more reliable than foresight, and that, considered as a magazine of facts, history is preferable to the imagination. But back-sight is history, and like good liquor it requires aging and maturing. The association of the imagination supplies these effects. History must be read with the help of the imagination even for present use; still more if the inquiry embraces a glance into the future. _Si quaeris futura, circumspice._ If you would know the future look around you. That which has been will be. All things have ever been under the domination of evolution and they ever will be. Therefore, let the imagination explore its trail, and you are at once a prophet. CHAPTER I. An Outing. Let me see. It was six (6) years since I had an outing. It seemed a long time and it was long enough to obscure the conviction I had once arrived at that the average outing is on the whole more of a bore than a pleasure and that its principal value consists in making a fellow satisfied with his ordinary work and glad to get back to it again. I am tolerably sure that I should have reached the same opinion even if I had not been the victim of a certain wretched adventure that happened away back in my “courting days”. On the occasion referred to I had taken my best girl for a little rowing and fishing on Brush Lake. We had not proceeded far when she “got a bite”, and it nearly drove her wild with excitement, she stood up in the boat and from her frantic exertions I judged she had hooked nothing less than a six pound bass. At last she pulled it out with a horizontal sweep, and whirling around with it, the middle of the line struck my head with such force as to send the fish revolving around my neck five times, and wound up by inserting the hook in the end of my nose and leaving the fish dangling and flapping against my face—a ridiculous little Sunfish not over three inches long. The excited lady dropped her pole and made such a violent lunge to secure her prize that she upset the boat and left us both floundering in the water. Amongst the fifteen or twenty spectators on the shore was Aquarius Jinks, whose father was a fisherman and had brought him up to think no more of jumping into the water than a water spaniel. So in he jumped and in a jiffy he rescued my lady and took her to the nearest house to get some dry clothes. As for myself, I was getting out all right in spite of the embarrassment of the choking line, my lacerated nose and that wretched fish that did not for a moment let up its frantic struggling and flapping. In addition to this I had the misfortune to be encumbered by the clumsy assistance of a fat German saloon-keeper, who by the help of the pole, which had now floated near the shore, drew me up, amid the jeers of the crowd, that now by the barbarous custom of the times, I was obliged to “treat.”