as gone on
for weeks, and he has been clothed and cosseted, and his patrons have
staked their penetration upon him; how is he to turn round and say he
has been cheating all the time? 'I should like to see you do it!' It
isn't that he wouldn't often have liked to be in the gutter again!"

This amusing account is diversified with expressions of Sludge's hearty
contempt for all the men and women he has imposed upon: above all, for
their absurd fancy that any scrap of unexpected information must have
come to him in a supernatural way. "As if a man could hold his nose out
of doors, and one smut out of the millions not stick to it; sit still
for a whole day, and one atom of news not drift into his ear!" This idea
recurs in various forms.

Well! he owns that he has cheated; and now that he has done so, he is
not at all sure that it _was_ all cheating, that there wasn't something
real in it after all. "We are all taught to believe that there is
another world; and the Bible shows that men have had dealings with it.
We are told this can't happen now, because we are under another law. But
I don't believe we are under another law. Some men 'see' and others
don't, that's the only difference. I see a sign and a message in
everything that happens to me; but I take a small message where you want
a big one. I am the servant who comes at a tap of his master's knuckle
on the wall; you are the servant who only comes when the bell rings. Of
course I mistake the sign sometimes. But what does that matter if I
sometimes don't mistake? You say: one fact doesn't establish a system.
You are like the Indian who picked up a scrap of gold, and never dug
for more. You pick up one sparkling fact, and let it go again. I pick up
one such, then another and another, and let go the dirt which makes up
the rest of life."

Sludge combats the probable objection that the heavenly powers are too
great, and he is too small for the kind of services he expects of them.
Everything, he delares, serves a small purpose as well as a great one.
Moreover, nothing nowadays _is_ small. It is at all events the lesser
things and not the greater which are spoken of with awe. The simple
creature which is only a sac is the nearest to the creative power; and
since also man's filial relation to the Creator is that most insisted
on, the more familiar and confiding attitude is the right one.

He lastly declares and illustrates his view that many a truth may
stagnate for want of