We would go on in silence for a space while he revised and restated that encounter. Then he would break out abruptly with some banal phrase. “The Battle of Life, George, my boy,” he would cry, or “Ups and Downs!” He ignored or waived the poor little attempts I made to ascertain my own position. “That’s all right,” he would say; or, “Leave all that to me. _I’ll_ look after them.” And he would drift away towards the philosophy and moral of the situation. What was I to do? “Never put all your resources into one chance, George; that’s the lesson I draw from this. Have forces in reserve. It was a hundred to one, George, that I was right—a hundred to one. I worked it out afterwards. And here we are spiked on the off-chance. If I’d have only kept back a little, I’d have had it on U.P. next day, like a shot, and come out on the rise. There you are!” His thoughts took a graver turn. “It’s where you’ll bump up against Chance like this, George, that you feel the need of religion. Your hard-and-fast scientific men—your Spencers and Huxleys—they don’t understand that. I do. I’ve thought of it a lot lately—in bed and about. I was thinking of it this morning while I shaved. It’s not irreverent for me to say it, I hope—but God comes in on the off-chance, George. See? Don’t you be too cocksure of anything, good or bad. That’s what I make out of it. I could have sworn. Well, do you think I—particular as I am—would have touched those Union Pacifics with trust money at all, if I hadn’t thought it a thoroughly good thing—good without spot or blemish?... And it was bad! “It’s a lesson to me. You start in to get a hundred percent. and you come out with that. It means, in a way, a reproof for Pride. I’ve thought of that, George—in the Night Watches. I was thinking this morning when I was shaving, that that’s where the good of it all comes in. At the bottom I’m a mystic in these affairs. You calculate you’re going to do this or that, but at bottom who knows at all _what_ he’s doing? When you most think you’re doing things, they’re being done right over your head. _You’re_ being done—in a sense. Take a hundred-to one chance, or one to a hundred—what does it matter? You’re being Led.” It’s odd that I heard this at the time with unutterable contempt, and now that I recall it—well, I ask myself, what have I got better? “I wish,” said I, becoming for a moment outrageous, “_you_ were being Led to give me some account of my money, uncle.” “Not without a bit of paper to figure on, George, I can’t. But you trust me about that never fear. You trust me.” And in the end I had to.