The reporters, dealing with that central fact, after a brief attempt to be facetious had become hushed and awes-truck. Their public would not allow them to be otherwise; America, having gotten a live halo to its shores, was not in a mood to have its genuineness questioned, the mystery of its origin derided, or any other slight put upon its dignity. It became a thing inviolate, sacred as ‘Old Glory’ herself; and when an unfortunate youth, unimpressed by the beauty of its holiness, shouted a derisive remark at its passing, the crowd lynched him for it. After that minority opinion became as terrorized from expressing itself as it had been while the ‘Liberty Loan’ was voluntarily subscribing for America’s entry into the war. There was no half-way safety point left: those who doubted the divine origin of Mr. Trimblerigg’s luminosity were regarded as Satanists; and when here, as in the old world, Episcopacy persisted in holding out, the genuineness of its Orders began for the first time to be generally doubted, and the numbers of its adherents seriously diminished. No wonder that even the ‘Movies’ became afraid of him, and offered him fabulous sums to turn film-artist, on the single condition that during his term of contract he would keep himself hid from the public eye. And so, if anybody had laughed at Mr. Trimblerigg’s ingenuous answer on the question of his greatness, the laugh speedily died down, having left nothing to feed on. For if Mr. Trimblerigg was not the greatest man in the world, he was, at all events, the greatest success. In a single week he had made America believe in miracle; after which, from such a source, America was ready to believe almost anything. His first message was delivered from the plinth of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbour, to an arrangement of loud-speakers which enabled him to be heard from Newark round by Staten Island to Brooklyn; thence, to a yet wider circle--embracing the greater part of the western hemisphere--broadcasting took up the tale, and if not quite making the world one, making Mr. Trimblerigg its sole topic of conversation. Record crowds attended the performance; two ferry-boats capsized under the one-sided weight of the thousands who jammed the upper decks. The churches, smarter in the uptake than those of his own country, were satisfactorily filled; for there also loud-speakers adorned the vacant pulpits, and congregations of a hundred denominations hung upon his lips. In that there was a danger, since verbal inspiration was now generally ascribed to him: and Mr. Trimblerigg being one of those orators who, when they let themselves go, are never quite sure what they may say,--or, afterwards, what they actually have said,--found it very hard to keep within safe bounds, or to withhold certain inspiring facts which he believed himself to possess.