nothing personal by way of guidance or assistance; and yet the
guidance, the assistance, never failed, though often I was not
conscious that they had been present until long afterwards. I felt,
as I said above, that somebody would be pleased.

For it was a consistent, an intelligent guidance; operating, as it
were, out of some completer survey of the facts at a given moment
than my own abilities could possibly have compassed; my mediocre
faculties seemed gathered together and perfected--with the result, in
time, that my "intuition," as others called it, came to be regarded
with a respect that in some cases amounted to half reverence. The
adjective "uncanny" was applied to me. The natives, certainly, were
aware of awe.

I made no private use of this unearned distinction; there is nothing
in me of the charlatan that claimed mysterious power; but my
subordinates, ever in growing numbers as my promotions followed, held
me in greater respect, apparently, on that very account. The natives,
especially, as I mentioned, attributed semi-deific properties to my
poor personality. Certainly my prestige increased out of all
proportion to anything my talents deserved with any show of justice.

I have said that, so far as I was concerned, there lay nothing
personal in this growth of divining intuition. I must now qualify
that a little. Nothing persuaded me that this guidance, so
infallible, so constant, owed its origin to what men call a being; I
certainly found no name for it; exactness, I think, might place its
truest description in some such term as energy, inner force or
inspiration; yet I must admit that, with its steady repetition, there
awoke in me an attitude towards it that eluded somewhere also an