A woman friend visiting from New York came to his Friday lecture and to a dinner he gave on the Saturday, asking to arrive an hour early so she could tell him things the other guests would not understand.

When IBM bought the 57th Street building and terminated her husband's lease, Louise made him name twelve things he wanted instead of reasons why he could not have them, and she imagined every one into being - the eight-story building at 41 West 57th Street, someone to take over their $1,250 apartment lease, and a 30th-floor apartment next door at $650.

His daughter at four told someone her father was 'a lecturer', which she could not pronounce, and rendered her mother's word 'functional' as 'punkenol' - a family word he still uses for a gift whose purpose nobody can work out.

He read out a further letter from his little friend Melo, aged eight or nine, describing how at the end of his lecture she saw him take off not his coat but his skin, saw through him the King she had seen when he took her to France - and the King was Neville - with a tombstone beside it bearing the name Neville; she signed it 'yours truly Milo McCaslin' and he keeps all her letters.

After he told the audience that Melo is Peter, the child went home and said quite matter-of-factly to her mother that it is an errand - she came to do an errand, she came to see God.

Neville's brother Victor, who reads no papers and owns no TV set, did a forty-million-dollar business this year in the family's private company and paid Neville a twenty per cent dividend on his stock while public companies' dividends fell.

A man in his audience, hearing that story, applied it to bamboo trees that his next-door neighbour had planted and that blocked his view of the city from the dining table; after a week of imagining the unobstructed view, his wife met him to say the neighbour had removed all the bamboos.

A woman friend present at the lecture told Neville that after his previous Friday lecture she and her husband read the Bible, that his name crowded her head as she fell asleep, and that she then found herself in a white robe and golden crown climbing stairs toward a pulsing light in which Neville stood — knowing she was looking at Neville and at God.

A lady wrote to Neville that she found herself to be Mr. O'Neal and her lady friend to be Mr. O'Sullivan, and that she stepped out of her own frozen body into that of Mr. O'Neal, which felt entirely natural.

He repeats a story he told earlier the same week about a DuPont heir who lost thirty-one million dollars and declared himself bankrupt, as the great-great-grandfather who founded the fortune had once done.

He tells how his brother Victor, a boy who started with nothing, imagined owning a building as if it were true; two years later a stranger was the means by which they bought it, and the family is now the most financially prominent on the island, with the governor seeking Victor's advice.

He tells of his own very large family, which had no money and nobody to borrow from, and of how one of them stumbled at a tender age on the secret in the Bible, the only book in the house.