“Wonder? So do I. I’m a bundle of wonderings.”
“Listen to Jabbock.”
“I do, more attentively than Jabbock to me. What of it?”
“Grander rivers are forgotten; why is it so remembered?”
“We’re forgotten, meaner men remembered.”
“This river sings through the centuries of history the song of a fugitive of pale heart, who in sheer desperation, long, long ago, seized a fleeting hope and became a prince, having power to prevail with God.”
“Ah, Jacob, who worked fourteen years to win a woman. It was, I’m sure, the woman that nerved him to attempt greatness. Such a woman! Had she been like our moderns she would have jilted him, or eloped with him, before the end of one of the fourteen years.”
“I’ll not tilt with thy sarcasms. It were much better to remember that he, a pigmy, the night in his soul, as that about him, black as Erebus, grappled with the mighty, unknown, unseen apparition to find he was holding Deity. The mysteries of crossing fates and chances are as open nut-bur compared to that of all weakness prevailing with Omnipotence, my good master, I think.”
“But ever after that joust, Jacob was a cripple!”
“Oh, but remember, as he halted on his thigh the sun rose over Penuel, ‘the place of seeing God,’ by interpretation. He was stronger for his laming!”