“Young man,” he said, “your revered granddam asks of you a righteous thing.  Who are you to trifle with those shining worlds that make a beauty of the night and that stir eternity in the soul of man?  Who are you to glue your pinpoint of a human eye to yonder machine and play with the stupendous Jupiter and Saturn as a child plays with marbles or with peg-tops?  Who are you that thinks those glittering monsters have nothing to do but to inform your pigmy brain of snowfalls, street accidents, and love-affairs prematurely, so that you may flaunt about your pocket-handkerchief of a square pluming your dwarfship that you are a prophet?  Fie, young man, and again fie!  Bow the knee, as I do, to the mysteries of the great universal scheme, instead of bothering them to turn informers and ‘give away’ the knowledge which is deliberately hidden from us.  Show me a man that can understand the present and you’ll have shown me a god.  And yet you knock at the gates of the heavens through that telescope and clamour to be told the future!  Fie upon you, young man, fie!  Oh-h-h-h!”

Now the Prophet, as has been before observed, possessed a very sensitive nature.  He was also very devoted to his grandmother, and had an extraordinary reverence for the world-famed attainments of Sir Tiglath Butt.  Therefore, when he heard Mrs. Merillia’s pleading, and the astronomer’s weighty denunciation, he was deeply moved.  Nevertheless, so strongly had recent events appealed to his curiosity, so ardently did he desire to search into the reality of his own peculiar powers, that it is very doubtful whether he might not have withstood both the behests of affection and of admiration had it not been that they took to themselves an ally, whose force is one of the moving spirits of the world.  This ally was fear.  Just as the Prophet was beginning to feel obstinate and to steel himself to resistance, he remembered the fierce and horrible threats of Malkiel the Second.  If he should cease to concern himself with the stars, if he should cease to prophesy, not alone should he restore peace to his beloved grandmother, and pay the tribute of respect to Sir Tiglath, but he should do more.  He should preserve his quick from being searched and his core from being probed.  His marrow, too, would be rescued from the piercing it had been so devoutly promised.  The dread, by which he was now companioned—­of Malkiel, of that portentous and unseen lady who dwelt beside the secret waters of the Mouse, of those imagined offshoots of the prophetic tree, Corona and Capricornus—­this would drop away.  He would be free once more, light-hearted, a happy and mildly intellectual man of the town, emerged from the thrall of bogies, and from beneath the yoke which he already felt laid upon his shoulders by those august creatures who were the centre of the architectural circle.

All these things suddenly presented themselves to the Prophet’s mind with extraordinary vividness and force.  His resolve was taken in a moment, and, turning to his eager grandmother and to the still slightly inflated astronomer, he exclaimed without further hesitation,—­