A history of the world. To round things off. I may as well—no more nit-picking stuff about Napoleon, Tito, the battle of Edgehill, Hernando Cortez…The works, this time. The whole triumphant murderous unstoppable chute—from the mud to the stars, universal and particular, your story and mine.

History is of course crammed with people like Mother, who are just sitting it out. It is the front-liners who are the exception—those who find themselves thus placed whether they like it or not and those who seek involvement. Gordon and I were front-liners, in our different ways.

The price of beaver on the London market determined the value of wampum; an agreeably bizarre economic circumstance—that a hat worn under a rainy Middlesex sky should be a matter of life and death for sea-shells creeping in the shallows of Cape Cod.

We open our mouths and out flow words...