‘When I call him, he shall be afraid; but though he fears me I will run after him. Yea, I will run while I wait; and though I bide my time yet will I catch him. When I make my light shine on him he shall be in doubt; I will withdraw my light from him, so that in darkness he may learn and know. I will put my hook in his mouth and lead him; yea, I will bait his breath so that he may become a catcher of men. He shall travel west, but east he shall return: he shall go far, but I will make him come again. Yea, the ship whereon he goes shall be shaken because of him; the rigging thereof shall tremble. Have I not given him a name?’ Mr. Trimblerigg no longer merely sat up, he skipped to his feet. Only one letter--the letter ‘i’ was missing to make the prophecy absolute. But proper names, he remembered, were very seldom correctly spelt in old days; and it had ever been a source of pride to him to know that upon his father’s side, far back, the family had been illiterate for generations. ‘Trimblerigg!’ ‘And the rigging thereof shall tremble. Have I not given him a name?’ What could be plainer than that? He continued to pore over the quaint crabbed writing, with its misspellings and its occasional misconstructions,--a style of grammar belonging to the half-educated of a century ago, but not much worse on the whole than the bad Greek of the New Testament. Was bad grammar and bad spelling a reason for rejecting a message so high? In the world’s eyes he feared it would be. In the worldly sense this Susannah was but a half-educated person; sometimes she made prophecies which he not only failed to identify, but which even seemed contradictory, in a wrong tone, out of place. This, for instance, presented a meaning less doubtful than undesirable; he had no use for it: ‘In that day the Lion and the Ass will lie down together; they will share a bed, they will eat hay together, and the heart of the Lion shall wax faint, and his thoughts grow foolish. And the Lion shall listen to the voice of the Ass, and shall think it wisdom. For the Ass shall bray and speak, saying, “It is going to rain”; and immediately it shall do so. Then shall the Ass say, “Come into my stable; for there I have a place prepared for thee, where it does not rain.” So shall they rise up and go, the Lion and the Ass together; and in the stable they shall find one waiting for them with his tackle prepared; and he shall let down his tackle upon their backs and harness the two of them, the Lion with the Ass, and the Ass with the Lion, making them to be a pair under one yolk. And all their apples shall be in one cart; and the man, the owner of the Ass shall drive them whither they know not.’