Now, connect with this the following from the Histoire Intime , and you have the complete history of this Prophet in Khalid’s cellar. For Khalid himself never gives us the facts in the case. Our Scribe, however, comes not short in this.
“The picture of the Prophet Jeremiah,” writes he, “Khalid hung on the wall, above his bed. And every night he would look up to it invokingly, muttering I know not what. One evening, while in this posture, he took up his lute and trolled a favourite ditty. For three days and three nights that picture hung on the wall. And on the morning of the fourth day—it was a cold December morning, I remember—he took it down and lighted the fire with it. The Pamphlet he had read a few days since, he also threw into the fire, and thereupon called to me saying, ‘Come, Shakib, and warm yourself.’ ”
And the Pamphlet, we learn, which was thus baptised in the same fire with the Prophet’s picture, was Tom Paine’s Age of Reason .