Today's Stichomancy for Roman Polanski

the bears got more real satisfaction out of the episode than the prophet did, because they got the children.

--Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar

This history must henceforth accommodate itself to the change which Roxana has consummated, and call the real heir "Chambers" and the usurping little slave, "Thomas `a Becket"--shortening this latter name to "Tom," for daily use, as the people about him did.

"Tom" was a bad baby, from the very beginning of his usurpation. He would cry for nothing; he would burst into storms of devilish temper without notice, and let go scream after scream and squall after squall, then climax the thing with "holding his breath"--

With sin to prove the victor. Perilous Things are these demons we call our passions: Slaves are we of their roving fancies, Fools of their devilish glee. -- You think me, I know, in this maundering way designing To lighten the load of my guilt and cast it Half on the shoulders of God. But hear me! I'm partly a man, -- for all my weakness, -- If weakness it were to stand and murder Before men's eyes the man who had murdered Me, and driven my burning forehead

in short, belching forth its kitchen smoke, impregnated the whole air with the scent of meats, fowls, and fishes, spicily concocted with odoriferous herbs, and onions in abundance. The mere smell of such festivity, making its way to everybody's nostrils, was at once an invitation and an appetite.

Maule's Lane, or Pyncheon Street, as it were now more decorous to call it, was thronged, at the appointed hour, as with a congregation on its way to church. All, as they approached, looked upward at the imposing edifice, which was henceforth to assume its rank among the habitations of mankind. There it rose, a little withdrawn from the line of the street, but in pride, not modesty. Its whole visible

House of Seven Gables