You cannot unscramble eggs. And so, having scrambled Mr. Trimblerigg in the making, his god was attempting a vain thing in trying to unscramble him; and when Mr. Trimblerigg went on his knees and prayed, as he occasionally did, to be unscrambled, he was only scrambling himself yet more in the fry-pan of his tribal theology. And indeed, when I look at him, I have to admire what a scramble of a man he was!--how the yolk and the white of it, the good and the evil, the thick and the thin of his character did mix, ‘yea, meet and mingle,’ as he would have said himself when his platform sense of poetry got the better of him. And so, in the exercise of those contradictory agilities of soul and brain which made him so mixed yet so divided a character, he skipped through life like a flea to Abraham’s bosom, and there--after so many an _alias_ hastily assumed and as hastily discarded--lies waiting to answer to his true name when true names are called. What kind of a name, one wonders, did he finally make for himself in the Book of Life? In that desperate saving of his own face which constitutes his career, he put out of countenance many that were his betters; but it was himself that, in the process, he put out of countenance most of all. Yet in the end revelation came to him; and when, in that ghastly moment of self-discovery, he stood fully charged with the truth, who shall say what miraculous, what fundamental change it may not have wrought in him? When he followed the upward rope which led him so expeditiously Elsewhere, it may have been with the equipment of a new self capable of much better and more honest things that he finally entered Heaven. I cannot believe that such a genius for self-adaptation has incontinently missed its mark. But, in that forward aim, it may well be that he and his tribal deity have parted company; for it is to be noted that, at the last gasp, the god loses sight--does not know what has become of him: thinks, perhaps, that he has gone irretrievably and abysmally--Down. I, on the contrary, have a suspicion and a hope that his tendency may have been--UP. L. H. CHAPTER ONE _Deus Loquitur_