It was not hard work so much as delicate; the wood was tender and worm-eaten, the old-fashioned nails with screw-heads came out quite easily--too easily in fact, at first; bits of the wood came with them. This frightened him, he went more slowly. After a tedious period of minute labour the wood was ready to come away in his hand. With his attitude to prophecy still unchanged he lifted it away, and out of the box like a pudding from its mould came a compact mass of very yellow stained paper slightly stuck together by mildew, and dampness that had dried. Mr. Trimblerigg saw at once that a long task was before him. The prophecies were in a small cramped hand with numerous contractions, and many words badly spelt. Here and there the ink had gone faint; in other parts time and moisture had made whole passages undecipherable; portions of the prophecy had indubitably passed into oblivion; but far larger portions remained. With the help of headings--titles symbolic in character--Mr. Trimblerigg began skimming. At first sceptical and a little bored, he presently grew interested; and though not yet convinced, he saw that from the publicity point of view the thing had possibilities. This, for instance, he regarded as an arresting passage: ‘And lo, when the Cock, stricken by the double-pated Eagle, draws in its claws, causing the Scarlet Parrot to fall from its perch, then shall a city fall and a people go free, and the mark of the Beast that was on it shall be blotted out.’ Mr. Trimblerigg, questing this way and that, searched his history; and when presently his mind lighted on a likely spot, he found there an astonishingly close parallel; for this, clearly, was--or could be taken as--a reference, couched in unfriendly terms, to the Papacy’s loss of Temporal Power in the year 1870, owing to the withdrawal of the French troops which protected it. Presently he began to feel that he was missing things through not knowing as much about modern history as he ought to do; and that a great deal that he was reading might possibly be true could he but discover the application. Presuming that the prophecies followed a chronological order, he turned on, and before long had struck substance. Here he was no longer out of his depth. ‘When the Bear and the Lion and the Cock shall rise up and stand together in a heap, and become as one for the defence of a Lamb that was without blame--’ This clearly was modern history, and though not quite true history it was the kind of history that was still being swallowed by the Public for which Mr. Trimblerigg had to cater. This at all events was the sort of thing that would go down; there was, in the journalistic sense, good copy in it. At first Mr. Trimblerigg had inclined to suppose that ‘the Lamb’ had a scriptural significance; he soon decided, however, that it was better for it to mean Belgium; without making the prophecy more true it made it more obvious.