A letter reached Neville the week before this lecture, sent by a correspondent (identified with the apostle Thaddeus) describing an injury from forty years earlier: at seventeen, while saddling a horse on the family wheat farm in Washington State, the horse stepped on his big toe, tearing off the toenail and damaging its root. The correspondent closed the letter marveling that 'for so little I was given so much,' after, by Neville's account, revisiting the memory for three nights.