The Human Chord

mewhere stretched immense playgrounds, compared to which the hay-fields and lawns of his father's estate seemed trivial: plains without horizon, seas deep enough to float the planets

s became alive until he discovered its true and living name. The name

f by pulling out all her hairs "that hadn't gone to sleep with the rest of her body," he took characteristic measures to protect her from the said depre

And, for a boy of eight, those cold and haunted hours must have seemed endless from ten o'clock to four in the morning, w

le man was nothing more

he said. "Any one with that name would be light as

ted, "or he couldn't pull the hairs

y, jealous of his offspring's reputation.

planation could persuade her that a person named Winky could be nice and gentle, e

gar, and twice as hoppy as the first. Only I won't do

p to claim it. Names described souls. To learn the name of a thing or person was to know all about them and make them subservient to his will; and "Winky" could only have been a very s

in never failed to touch his sense of awe. "What's in a name?" for him, was a significant question-a question of life or death. For to mispronounce a name was a bad blunder, but to name it wrongly was to miss it altogether. Such a t

e day in the far future, he knew, some wonderful girl would come into his life, singing her own true name like music, her whole personality expressing it just as her lips framed the consonants and vowels-and h

areful balance that adjusts cause and effect. And this it is, no doubt, that makes his adventures such "hard sayings." It becomes diff

n the look out for the "job" that might conceal the kind of adventure he wanted. Once the work of the moment proved barren of this possibility, he wearied of it and sought another. And the search seemed prolonged and hopeless, for the adventure he sought was not a common kind, but something that should provide him with a means of escape from a vulgar and noisy world that bored

subject and selected the sound best suited to describe him: Spinrobin-Robert. For, had he never seen himself, but run into that inner p

low collar and bright red tie; had soft pink cheeks, dancing grey eyes and loosely scattered hair, prematurely thin and unquestionably like feathers. His hands and feet were small and nimble. When he stood in his favorite attitude with hands plunged deep in h

umbers of strange people advertised in the newspapers, he knew, just as numbers of strange people wrote letters to them; and Spinny-so he was called by those who loved him-was a diligent student of the columns known as "Agony" and "Help wan

that formed the ba

ge and imagination. Tenor voice and some knowledge of Hebrew es

dge because he liked the fine, high-sounding names of deities and angels to be found in that language. Courage and imagination he lumped in, so to speak, with the rest, and in the gilt-edged diary he affected he wrote: "Have taken on Skale's odd advertis