Neville reads out a letter he received the previous Thursday night from a man in the audience, who — after finding The Law and the Promise — imagined a signed fire-insurance policy in his hand until brokers took the risk without inspecting his brush-covered hillside, and afterwards imagined his yard green until a stranger cleared the slide of decomposed granite for a dollar and a quarter an hour.

Neville relays Eddie's story as it was told to the letter-writer and passed on to him: Eddie, fifty-four, orphaned in the '30s, a failed suicide put in an asylum, living in a tent and prospecting for gold, heard a voice in the empty desert say 'I AM' and 'Do not come up here, I AM', climbed the hill anyway and found an uncoiled four-foot rattler staring at him, and ran.

Neville says he has spoken over the past year of Eddie, a man he does not know personally but almost regards as a friend, who stumbled on the power and is afraid of using it lest he disturb Nature.

A writer in his audience handed Neville a letter after the previous Tuesday's meeting, describing how he solved a story problem by imagining himself in Robert Louis Stevenson's shoes, and then realised in the shower that his friend Eddie — the limping, mildly insane man who lives in a tent in the Hollywood hills — was identical to a character he had invented six years earlier.

Retelling a story he told the previous Friday: a professional writer friend realised in the shower that his friend Eddie, met by accident two years earlier, was identical with the central character of a story dictated to him six years before, and re-read Neville's chapter "There is no Fiction" in The Law and The Promise.