Mr. Trimblerigg did not like fleas; he made an instinctive pounce, and the flea died the death. Then the wonder of it occurred to him. He sat up, he got out of bed, he went to the glass. In the darkness he could see himself: Crocean dawn was round him once more. His surreptitious action of the last few hours, Heaven had now justified. He had no longer any doubts, any fears; he did not even see difficulties, for now the world was running to meet him, and millions of his fellow-creatures were prepared to take without question anything he offered them. Faint with bliss, he tottered back to bed, laid his crowned head upon the pillow, and slept. CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO _The Procession Continues_ The next morning there was a small fly in the ointment of his bliss; a letter from Davidina. Thousands of miles away, among the swamps of the Amazon, news had apparently reached her of her brother’s marvellous doings; and of course, as he might have expected, her comment sounded the note of criticism. ‘My dear Jonathan,’ ran the letter, ‘if you go on like that, you will burst. ‘Yours affectionate, ‘D. T.’ The letter came too late. Mr. Trimblerigg no longer cared what the far-removed Davidina thought of him. Her long-distance pin-pricks had lost their medicinal virtue. ‘Puff!’ he remarked airily; and as he flipped the letter into the waste-paper basket, his fate resumed the jiggety tenor of its way, and the bursting process went on. For in the last few hours Mr. Trimblerigg had greatly fortified himself by prayer, so that his good opinion of himself was now undeflectable; and the old helpless feeling, which his attacks of prayer so often gave me, had come upon me once more. But this time I was rather enjoying it, and was very much interested, wondering how far--left to himself--Mr. Trimblerigg would go. If ever the human race comes to read its own history, without prejudice, or blindness, or superstition, it will discover as never before what a tremendous part answer to prayer has played in man’s making. As never before: for the strangest part of that discovery will be from which end the answer to prayer has come. Man claims many virtues which he does not possess; but he has also a few which he does not know; and if my materials have sometimes disappointed me, and inclined me to think that, on the whole, the making of man was a mistake, I have only had to turn and watch him in his marvellous manufacture of answers to his own prayers, to feel afresh the encouragement and diversion with which the work of creation has provided me.