He wasn__ sure why he felt so compelled to follow the singing, or why he needed to bring the foot with him, but he knew the two phenomena were connected. And in the midst of the mystery lay his father. His father__ sanity. Nicholas was sure of this.

Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.

The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. I know this by my own experience, & to this day I cherish an unappeased bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old. None can do that and ever draw a clean sweet breath again on this side of the grave.

The Captain, so close as he was, didn__ warrant their attention. Even a fly on a horse__ hindquarters gets a tail whip. And that is the thick of it. We are less than flies to these foul foes.

I said it was a brutal thing."No, it was a human thing. You should not insult the brutes by such a misuse of that word; they have not deserved it.

Do we take less pride in the possession of our home because its walls were built by some unknown carpenter, its tapestries woven by some unknown weaver on a far Oriental shore, in some antique time? No. We show our home to our friends with the pride as if it were our home, which it is. Why then should we take less pride when reading a book written by some long-dead author? Is it not our book just as much, or even more so, than theirs? So the landowner says, __ook at my beautiful home! Isn__ it fine?_ And not, __ook at the home so-and-so has built._ Thus we shouldn__ cry, __ook what so-and-so has written. What a genius so-and-so is!_ But rather, __ook at what I have read! Am I not a genius? Have I not invented these pages? The walls of this universe, did I not build? The souls of these characters, did I not weave?