With his higher aspirations thus blown upon, Mr. Trimblerigg, after watering Davidina’s pet fern with strong tea which it did not like, diverted his invention to more practical ends, and for a time wished to be a conjurer, having read accounts of the wonders performed at the Egyptian Hall, London, by Messrs. Maskelyne & Cooke. But as ill-luck would have it, his first sight of conjuring came to him at a village fair; and there, while others stared and were amazed, he with his sharp eyes saw how everything was done, and found the entertainment dull. Now had he only been interested and stirred to emulation thus early, I am quite convinced that Mr. Trimblerigg could have become a conjurer such as the world has never seen. If his parents could only have afforded to take him to London, and to the Egyptian Hall, the world’s history might have been different. It was not to be. [Illustration: JONATHAN TRIMBLERIGG (aged 7) with his Mother & Sister Davidina] Mr. Trimblerigg’s attention was first attracted to the career his elders designed for him, not so much by the habitual goodness with which the rivalry of Davidina had imbued his character, as by his observation of the sensation caused in his native village by the missionizing efforts of a certain boy-preacher, then known to fame as ‘The Infant Samuel Samuel,’ whose call, beginning at his baptism in that strange invocative reduplication of the family name imposed by his godparents, went on till it suddenly passed in silence to an obscurity from which the veil has never been lifted. What happened then nobody knows, or nobody chooses to tell. But between the ages of seven and fifteen, while sustained by the call, Samuel Samuel never saw a vacant seat, or an uncrowded aisle, or had sitting under him a congregation unrent by sobs in the hundreds of chapels to which the spirit bore him. When Mr. Trimblerigg heard him, Samuel Samuel at the age of ten was still in the zenith of his powers; and it has been credibly reported that, in the mining villages which he passed through, publicans went bankrupt and committed suicide because of him, and pit-ponies, their ears robbed of the familiar expletives to which they had been trained, no longer obeyed orders; and that alongside of these manifestations of grace, the illegitimate birth-rates went up and struck a record; till, six months later, things settled back and became the same; birth-rates went down, pit-ponies obeyed a restored vocabulary, and ruined publicans were vindicated in the prosperity of their successors.