THE PROPHET PRODIGY

Despite occasional lapses into quiescence, the species juvenilia continues to justify its Wordsworthian epithet of "mighty prophets, seer blest". Vibrations of exotic metre have scarcely died away in a certain quarter of Brooklyn when the evangelical eloquence of twelve year old Uldine Utley presages a great western spiritual movement. For Uldine, according to her biographer in the American Magazine, is the California child that has moved ten thousand men to lead better lives.

Like all inspired prophets, Uldine's pulpit propensities originated from a spiritual awakening. "An expert child dancer at eleven", to quote her own middest words, a chance visit to a revival meeting "caused something all of a sudden to happen inside her." After she had thus perceived the hollowness of mundane life and renounced it, her debut in her new role was dramatic. Suddenly appearing in a railway yard at lunch hour, she began to preach to the workers. One o'clock came but no whistle blew. Uldine's words had held all the workers enthralled. Out stalked an angry boss to discover what the trouble was, but he, too, felt Uldine's spell and stayed to listen. Thus did wisdom encounter and overcome the forces of Mammon.

Although Uldine's vocation of bringing light and leisure to the worker has been crowned with success, four sessions of Sunday school represent the sum of her incursion into the subtleties of dogma. And like her Brooklyn prototype her educational progress has been but mediocre. But then, as Carlyle once remarked in a burst of etymological exaltation, the word "vates" once meant both "prophet" and "poet", and the ways of each are equally inscrutable to the average man.