It is difficult in this record to remain consecutive. Those who would follow with accuracy the career of Mr. Trimblerigg, must jump to and fro with the original--one of whom it has to be said that though he denied himself many times (even in the face of the clearest evidence) he denied himself nothing that held out any prospect of keeping his fortunes on the move; and the stitch in time with which he so often and so nimbly saved himself ran in no straight line of machine-made regularity, but rather in a series of diversions this way and that, stepping sideways and back preparatory to the next forward leap; and in this feather-stitching along life’s road he covered more ground, and far more ornamentally, than do those who go merely upon their convictions, holding to one opinion and doing only one thing at a time. Yet it would be wrong to say that he was ever false to his convictions, for these he seldom knew. Enough that so long as they lasted his intuitions were sacred to him; and as it is the very essence of intuitions that at any moment they may change, his changeableness had about it a sort of truth, of consistency, to which slower minds cannot attain. But why call it ‘intuition’; why not ‘vision’? Well, if a camera of powerful lens and stocked with highly sensitive films may be said to have vision, vision he had in abundance. Adjusting his focus to the chosen point of view, he clicked the switch of his receptivity, snapt a picture, wound it off upon its wheel, and was ready for another. In the space of a few minutes he had as many pictures stored as he had a mind for. ‘Vision’? You may grant it him, if you will, so long as you remember that that was the process. I would rather be inclined to call it ‘optics’; and I see his career now rather as a series of optical delusions, through every one of which he remained quite convinced that he was right, and that the truth had come to him by way of revelation. An early example will serve. The small hill-side village in which Mr. Trimblerigg first learned to escape the limitations of ordinary life was a place where things seldom happened; and there were times in his early upbringing when he found himself at a loose end, a rose wasting its sweetness to the desert air; there was nothing doing in the neighbourhood on which he could decisively set his mark. This was to live in vain; and often he searched through his small world of ideas to find inspiration. Should he run away from home, and be found wandering with his memory a blank? Should he be kidnapped by gipsies and escape in nothing but his shirt? Should a sheep fall into the stone quarry so that he might rescue it, or a lamb get lost in the snow during the lambing-season, that he might go out, and find, and return bearing it in his bosom? Or should he go forth and become famous as a boy-missionary, preaching to the heathen in an unknown tongue? These were all possibilities, only the last suggested any difficulty.