Cylinder Head Quotes

Please follow these instructions: 1. Stack the pages of this letter neatly. 2. Roll the pages up into a cylinder. 3. Smack yourself over the head with it. 4. Repeat. You complete ass.

When you're mortal, life is nothing more than a drawn-out game of Russian Roulette. Every moment is the spin of a gun cylinder, every decision pointing the barrel at your head. Over and over, again and again, you pull the trigger, hoping it won't be your last turn in the game.

We wrote our software to know the detailed structure of the disk. It knew that the disk had 200 cylinders and 10 heads, and that each cylinder had several dozen sectors per head. It knew which cylinders held the Agents, Employers, and Members. All this was hard-wired into the code. ... One day a more experienced programmer joined our ranks. When he saw what we had done, the blood drained from his face, and he stared aghast at us, as if we were aliens of some kind. Then he gently advised us to change our addressing scheme to use relative addresses.

Writers have come to master nearly every trade. They are inventors and entrepreneurs of character, plot, and dialogue. They are the eager scientists that can’t wait to try out their new experiment. They are the maestros of the symphony that plays in their head, conducting what happens, where, and at what precise moment. They are engineers and architects that design the structure of their piece so it stands the test of time and continues to fire on all cylinders. They play mechanics and doctors in their revisions, hoping they prescribe the correct diagnosis to fix the piece’s 'boo boos'. They are salesmen who pitch not an idea or a product, but themselves, to editors, publishers, and more importantly, their readers. They are teachers who through their craft, preach to pupils about what works and what doesn’t work and why. Writers can make you feel, can make you think, can make you wonder, but they can also grab your hand and guide you through their maze. Similar to what Emerson stated in 'The Poet,' writers possess a unique view on life, and with their revolving eye, they attempt to encompass all. I am a writer.

You heard me. Let someone else send you to your blaze of glory. You're a speck, man. You're nothing. You're not worth the bullet or the mark on my soul for taking you out." You trying to piss me off again, Patrick?" He removed Campbell Rawson from his shoulder and held him aloft. I tilted my wrist so the cylinder fell into my palm, shrugged. "You're a joke, Gerry. I'm just calling it like I see it." That so?" Absolutely." I met his hard eyes with my own. "And you'll be replaced, just like everything else, in maybe a week, tops. Some other dumb, sick shit will come along and kill some people and he'll be all over the papers, and all over Hard Copy and you'll be yesterday's news. Your fifteen minutes are up, Gerry. And they've passed without impact." They'll remember this," Gerry said. "Believe me." Gerry clamped back on the trigger. When he met my finger, he looked at me and then clamped down so hard that my finger broke. I depressed the trigger on the one-shot and nothing happened. Gerry shrieked louder, and the razor came out of my flesh, then swung back immediately, and I clenched my eyes shut and depressed the trigger frantically three times. And Gerry's hand exploded. And so did mine. The razor hit the ice by my knee as I dropped the one shot and fire roared up the electrical tape and gasoline on Gerry's arm and caught the wisps of Danielle's hair. Gerry threw his head back and opened his mouth wide and bellowed in ecstasy. I grabbed the razor, could barely feel it because the nerves in my hand seemed to have stopped working. I slashed into the electric tape at the end of the shotgun barrel, and Danielle dropped away toward the ice and rolled her head into the frozen sand. My broken finger came back out of the shotgun and Gerry swung the barrels toward my head. The twin shotgun bores arced through the darkness like eyes without mercy or soul, and I raised my head to meet them, and Gerry's wail filled my ears as the fire licked at his neck. Good-bye, I thought. Everyone. It's been nice. Oscar's first two shots entered the back of Gerry's head and exited through the center of his forehead and a third punched into his back. The shotgun jerked upward in Gerry's flaming arm and then the shots came from the front, several at once, and Gerry spun like a marionette and pitched toward the ground. The shotgun boomed twice and punched holes through the ice in front of him as he fell. He landed on his knees and, for a moment, I wasn't sure if he was dead or not. His rusty hair was afire and his head lolled to the left as one eye disappeared in flames but the other shimmered at me through waves of heat, and an amused derision shone in the pupil. Patrick, the eye said through the gathering smoke, you still know nothing. Oscar rose up on the other side of Gerry's corpse, Campbell Rawson clutched tight to his massive chest as it rose and fell with great heaving breaths. The sight of it-something so soft and gentle in the arms of something so thick and mountaineous-made me laugh. Oscar came out of the darkness toward me, stepped around Gerry's burning body, and I felt the waves of heat rise toward me as the circle of gasoline around Gerry caught fire. Burn, I thought. Burn. God help me, but burn. Just after Oscar stepped over the outer edge of the circle, it erupted in yellow flame, and I found myself laughing harder as he looked at it, not remotely impressed. I felt cool lips smack against my ear, and by the time I looked her way, Danielle was already past me, rushing to take her child from Oscar. His huge shadow loomed over me as he approached, and I looked up at him and he held the look for a long moment. How you doing, Patrick?" he said and smiled broadly. And, behind him, Gerry burned on the ice. And everything was so goddamned funny for some reason, even though I knew it wasn't. I knew it wasn't. I did. But I was still laughing when they put me in the ambulance.

Bruce looked at David and David asked, “Is that Harold?” He was wearing the same Meadow Brook Basketball jacket and had only a few gray hairs left on his round head. Harold walked up to his two favorite players and exclaimed, “Give me five!” and he extended both hands and the guys lightly slapped his palms, as the other eight ex-players chuckled in the background. The cylinders started clicking in David’s mind as Harold said, “On the other side.” The guys lightly slapped the knuckle side of Harold’s hand as David said, “Oh, shit!

You’re too goddamned fat,” he said. I took a defiant drag on my cigarette and willed myself not to cry. The remark made me dizzy. For the past four years, Ma and Grandma had played by the rule: never to mention my weight. Now my jeans and sweatshirt were folded in a helpless pile beside me and there was only a thin sheet of paper between my rolls of dimply flesh and this detestable old man. My heart raced with fear and nicotine and Pepsi. My whole body shook, dripped sweat. “Any trouble with your period?” he asked. “No.” “What?” “No trouble,” I managed, louder. He nodded in the direction of his stand-up scale. The backs of my legs made little sucking sounds as they unglued themselves from the plastic upholstery. He brought the sliding metal bar down tight against my scalp and fiddled with the cylinder in front of my face. “Five-five and a half,” he said. “Two hundred . . . fifty-seven.” The tears leaking from my eyes made stains on the paper gown. I nodded or shook my head abruptly at each of his questions, coughed on command for his stethoscope, and took his pamphlets on diet, smoking, heart murmur. He signed the form. At the door, his hand on the knob, he turned back and waited until I met his eye. “Let me tell you something,” he said. “My wife died four Tuesdays ago. Cancer of the colon. We were married forty-one years. Now you stop feeling sorry for yourself and lose some of that pork of yours. Pretty girl like you—you don’t want to do this to yourself.” “Eat shit,” I said. He paused for a moment, as if considering my comment. Then he opened the door to the waiting room and announced to my mother and someone else who’d arrived that at the rate I was going, I could expect to die before I was forty years old. “She’s too fat and she smokes,” I heard him say just before the hall rang out with the sound of my slamming his office door. I was wheezing wildly by the time I reached the final landing. On the turnpike on the way home, Ma said, “I could stand to cut down, too, you know. It wouldn’t hurt me one bit. We could go on a diet together? Do they still sell that Metrecal stuff?” “I’ve been humiliated enough for one fucking decade,” I said. “You say one more thing to me and I’ll jump out of this car and smash my head under someone’s wheels.

The company was now come to a halt and the first shots were fired and the grey riflesmoke rolled through the dust as the lancers breached their ranks. The kid's horse sank beneath him with a long pneumatic sigh. He had already fired his rifle and now he sat on the ground and fumbled with his shotpouch. A man near him sat with an arrow hanging out of his neck. He was bent slightly as if in prayer. The kid would have reached for the bloody hoop-iron point but then he saw that the man wore another arrow in his breast to the fletching and he was dead. Everywhere there were horses down and men scrambling and he saw a man who sat charging his rifle while blood ran from his ears and he saw men and he saw men with their revolvers disassembled trying to fit the fit the spare loaded cylinders they carried and he saw men kneeling who tilted and clasped their shadows on the ground and he saw men lanced and caught up by the hair and scalped standing and he saw the horses of war trample down the fallen and a little whitefaced pony with one clouded eye leaned out of the murk and snapped at him like a dog and was gone. Among the wounded some seemed dumb and without understanding and some were pale through the masks of dust and some had fouled themselves or tottered brokenly onto the spears of the savages. Now driving in a wild frieze of headlong horses with eyes walled and teeth cropped and naked riders with clusters of arrows clenched in their jaws and their shields winking in the dust and up the far side of the ruined ranks in a pipping of boneflutes and dropping down off the side of their mounts with one heel hung in the the withers strap and their short bows flexing beneath the outstretched necks of the ponies until they had circled the company and cut their ranks in two and then rising up again like funhouse figures, some with nightmare faces painted on their breasts, ridding down the unhorsed Saxons and spearing and clubbing them and leaping from their mounts with knives and running about on the ground with a peculiar bandylegged like creatures driven to alien forms of locomotion and stripping the clothes from the dead and seizing them up by the hair and passing their blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, heads, gutting the strange white torsos and holding up great handfuls of viscera, genitals, some of the savages so slathered up with gore they might have rolled in it like dogs and some who fell upon the dying and sodomized them with loud cries to their fellows. And now the horses of the dead came pounding out of the smoke and dust and circled with flapping leather and wild manes and eyes whited with fear like the eyes of the blind and some were feathered with arrows and some lanced through and stumbling and vomiting blood as they wheeled across the killing ground and clattered from sight again. Dust stanched the wet and naked heads of the scalped who with the fringe of hair beneath their wounds and tonsured to the bone now lay like maimed and naked monks in the bloodsoaked dust and everywhere the dying groaned and gibbered and horses lay screaming

Motion in space can proceed in any direction and back again. Motion in time only proceeds in one direction in the everyday world, whatever seems to be going on at the particle level. It’s hard to visualize the four dimensions of spacetime, each at right angles to the other, but we can leave out one dimension and imagine what this strict rule would mean if it applied to one of the three dimensions we are used to. It’s as if we were allowed to move either up or down, either forward or back, but that sideways motion was restricted to shuffling to the left, say. Movement to the right is forbidden. If we made this the central rule in a children’s game, and then told a child to find a way of reaching a prize off to the right-hand side (“backward in time”) it wouldn’t take too long for the child to find a way out of the trap. Simply turn around to face the other way, swapping left for right, and then reach the prize by moving to the left. Alternatively, lie down on the floor so that the prize is in the “up” direction with reference to your head. Now you can move both “up” to grasp the prize and “down” to your original position, before standing up again and returning your personal space orientation to that of the bystanders.* The technique for time travel allowed by relativity theory is very similar. It involves distorting the fabric of space-time so that in a local region of space-time the time axis points in a direction equivalent to one of the three space directions in the undistorted region of space-time. One of the other space directions takes on the role of time, and by swapping space for time such a device would make true time travel, there and back again, possible. American mathematician Frank Tipler has made the calculations that prove such a trick is theoretically possible. Space-time can be distorted by strong gravitational fields,and Tipler’s imaginary time machine is a very massive cylinder, containing as much matter as our sun packed into a volume 100 km long and 10 km in radius, as dense as the nucleus of an atom, rotating twice every millisecond and dragging the fabric of space-time around with it. The surface of the cylinder would be moving at half the speed of light. This isn’t the sort of thing even the maddest of mad inventors is likely to build in his backyard, but the point is that it is allowed by all the laws of physics that we know. There is even an object in the universe that has the mass of our sun, the density of an atomic nucleus, and spins once every 1.5 milliseconds, only three times slower than Tipler’s time machine. This is the so-called “millisecond pulsar,” discovered in 1982. It is highly unlikely that this object is cylindrical—such extreme rotation has surely flattened it into a pancake shape. Even so, there must be some very peculiar distortions of space-time in its vicinity. “Real” time travel may not be impossible, just extremely difficult and very, very unlikely. That thin end of what might be a very large wedge may, however, make the normality of time travel at the quantum level seem a little more acceptable. Both quantum theory and relativity theory permit time travel, of one kind or another. And anything that is acceptable to both those theories, no matter how paradoxical that something may seem, has to be taken seriously. Time travel, indeed, is an integral part of some of the stranger features of the particle world, where you can even get something for nothing, if you are quick about it.

Frank heard the glass of water thump on the stand that he now imagined might be beside the bed, which meant it was. Finally something firm to grasp, in his mind and with his hand. He reached out very slowly, as he didn’t want to risk tearing the gauze that was so precariously holding his vital organs together. He felt wood. His fingers slid shakily over the corners of the table, feeling their reality, their solidity. He tried to picture it in his head, all rough hewn and unpainted, but the white kept slipping in, even though he knew Mexicans rarely painted anything with a neutral color. Still, there it was, a whitewashed bed stand in his mind. He tried to overlook it, and reached up higher to find the glass cylinder full of what his body was screaming out for, water. That was why he felt so tight, he figured. His tissues and muscles had all dried up, and he needed to rehydrate them before even attempting to move. So at last, grasping the all important container, his fingers straining against its mighty heft, he slowly slipped it to and then off of the edge of the little table. Vast oceans of bluey refuge sloshed against their constraints, spilling their powerful waves over the side, across his sleeping hand, and onto the bed sheets below that were undoubtedly as white as Santa’s fucking beard. But the spill, the great cresting of the breakers over the levee walls, tremendous in its awesome power and glory, had only served to excite him, to intrigue him, the refreshment that the backside of his hand was lapping up osmotically served only to stoke the great thirst within him, and with God steadying his hand, he tipped his gauze laden head up, muscled the glass towards his mouth with veins rippling in his arms, and tipped it. It was not a perfect pour. Water splashed against his forehead, his eyes still clenched tightly in their death struggle against the white, as he had no idea where his mouth was at that point anyway. But he really didn’t give a shit where the life giving fluid went, for he had become a very gauzey sponge, and his tissues would reach their strange and parched tendrils across the entire room if they must to soak up the precious juices that would in turn dissolve their steely grip and allow him to rise from his low perch and sallie forth across the blue fields of agave that awaited a non-suicidal tourist’s itinerary, just outside the door he could not remember but which must surely be bolted to an opening that must surely be the gateway to the very room in which he must surely be attempting to drink.

Certain elements of the early dynastic civilization, which do not appear in that of the earlier pre-dynastic period, resemble well-known elements of the civilization of Babylonia. We may instance the use of the cylinder-seal, which died out in Egypt in the time of the XVIIIth Dynasty, but was always used in Babylonia from the earliest to the latest times. The early Egyptian mace-head is of exactly the same type as the early Babylonian one.

I don't understand," she said. "I have no clue what you were trying to say this morning." "Yeah. I'm sorry. I'm not firing on all eight cylinders right now." He self-consciously attempted to rub away the purpling sags beneath his eyes. After the white spots dissipated she had impossibly grown even more beautiful. She was magical like that; even if he only looked away for a moment, when he returned his gaze upon her, those cheeks, those eyes, those lips were somehow even more enticing. Somehow even more irresistible. Jesus, could she make him thump. "I didn't really sleep last night. After reading your comments and seeing your handwriting again after such a long time...my head shot into a kind of hyperdrive." "What do you mean?" Her eyes fluttered as she looked up at him. Not flirtatiously, but with inquisitiveness. Oh, the way she fluttered those lids. His chest expanded; he was beyond enamored of her intellect and the way she always needed to get the clearest picture possible. "I just couldn't stop thinking how great everything was between us, and how fantastic everything is going to be once we work out the personal shit we're both dealing with," he said. "I had goosebumps trilling up my arms and the back of my neck because I have already done three or four rewrites, and like eighty percent of the changes I made mirrored your suggestions." He took a deep breath. He would inhale her entirety if he could, make her a permanent part of himself- absorb her being. "It was kind of eerie." He placed a clumsy hand on her cheek and caressed her eyebrow with his thumb, wishing to god it were his bottom lip. "And so not surprising.

his cylinder head temperature right at 215° Centigrade. That’s what the book said was the most efficient climbing attitude, and Major Parks flew by the book. As they passed through 12,000 feet, he put the black rubber mask over his face, readjusted his headset to accommodate

Journal of Interdisciplinary Science Topics How many lies could Pinocchio tell before it became lethal? Steffan Llewellyn The Centre for Interdisciplinary science, University of Leicester 25/03/2014 Abstract: This paper investigates how many lies Pinocchio could continuously tell before it would become fatal, treating the head and neck forces as a basic lever system with the exponential growth of the nose. This paper concludes that Pinocchio could only sustain 13 lies in a row before the maximum upward force his neck could exert cannot sustain his head and nose. The head’s overall centre of mass shifts over 85 metres after 13 lies, and the overall length of the nose is 208 metres. Pinocchio’s Nose Pinocchio is the fable of a wooden puppet, carved by Geppetto, who dreams of becoming a real boy [1]. Pinocchio was portrayed as a character prone to lying, which is manifested physically through the ability to grow his nose when he tells a lie. One issue of growing his nose would be the shift of Pinocchio’s centre of mass within his head, causing strain on his neck, which helps stabilise his head’s position with upwards force. If this continued, then his neck could not support his head, potentially decapitating the puppet. Outlined here is the minimum lie count Pinocchio could continuously expel. Where Pinocchio manages to form new is not addressed in this paper. Maximum Force Pinocchio’s Neck Can Exert The assumption is simplified by allowing the force exerted upwards through the neck to be positioned at the back of the head. The head is treated as a sphere, and the nose as a cylinder, as shown in The type of wood Pinocchio is carved from is disputed, but for this paper, it is concluded that Pinocchio is made from Oak, with a density of . Pinocchio’s neck will brake if its compression strength threshold is overcome by the weight of his head. The compression strength of oak is 1150Psi [2], and the circumference of the average human neck is 0.4m [3]. The maximum force Pinocchio’s neck can sustain is: ( ) ( ) Centre of Mass, and Force Exerted Figure 1. Figure 1: Illustrates the lever system of Pinocchio’s head and neck, with opposite forcesNeck muscles are required to balance the weight exerted by the skull.Usually, the weight of the nose can be considered negligible. In Pinocchio’s case, as the nose increases, it will have a significant impact on the centre of mass and weight of his head. The mass of the head is unchanged: ( )

A crush of bodies surrounded the featureless monument. The enraged dead clambered atop their ghastly kin. Caiaphas tucked his knees to his chest and hugged his legs tightly, staring at the scores of ragged, flailing hands as they scratched for purchase over the edge of the cylinder. Metal thrummed and thunder roared, filling his head. Now there were words within the deafening roar. “Straaaange,” they seemed to say. “Daaaace…” “Straaaangerrrr…” Then a quick, awful chant: “CAIAPHAS! FOREVER! CAI—” And with a piercing whistle it ended as his eardrums burst.

A dead run and he began to be afraid because she had to start in the next three or it was no go, after twenty-six days, no go. Risk the next cartridge on clearing the pots—she was too rich, stank of the stuff. Mixture weak, switches off, throttle wide open and risk it. Five. Steady and no kick, a clearer, with black-and-blue muck curling out of the pipe; he shivered in the heat with two to go and the fear of Christ in him. Six. A spinner and she kicked, banging on the gears with the air frame shaking, blue smoke curling, clearing—orange flame and the big prop spinning at a run and settling, putting out a roar from the pipe that drowned the sound of the sobbing in his throat as he eased the revs up and sat like a sack listening to the cylinders beating, hunting, one of them choked still but picking up—then she was running with a will and in the long sweet sound he heard another, faintly, and turned his head and saw them standing there with their mouths open, cheering.

At the end of the corridor, they halted before some wide windows. On the other side lay a cylinder, located in the middle of a white room. Before the scanner stood a kind of table on tracks, fitted with a kind of hoop used to hold the head in place. “This scanner is one of the most cutting-edge machines in existence. Three teslas of magnetic field, a picture of the brain every demi-second, powerful statistical analysis system…I hope you’re not claustrophobic, Captain?” “No, why?” “In that case, you’re the one who’ll go in the scanner, if you wouldn’t mind.

trusty old American .45—five cartridges in and the hammer down on the empty. The bulky blue steel revolver felt heavy and cold in his hand as he quickly snapped out the cylinder and checked the load. The slugs were scooped out and a deep cross had been cut into the head of each.

The revolver was chambered for .442 rounds, which meant there was only room for five. "These are large caliber bullets for such a short gun," Merritt remarked. "It's designed to stop someone at close range," Ethan said, absently arching up to rub a spot on his chest. "Being hit by one of those bullets feels like a kick from a mule." "Why is the hammer bobbed?" "To keep it from catching on the holster or clothing, if I have to draw it fast." Keeping the muzzle of the gun pointed away from him, Merritt reassembled the revolver, slid the extractor rod into place, and locked it deftly. "Well done," Ethan commented, surprised by her assurance. "You're familiar with guns, then." "Yes, my father taught me. May I shoot it?" "What are you going to aim for?" By this time, the others had come out from the parlor to watch. "Uncle Sebastian," Merritt asked, "are those pottery rabbits on the stone wall valuable?" Kingston smiled slightly and shook his head. "Have at it." "Wait," Ethan said calmly. "That's a twenty-yard distance. You'll need a longer-range weapon." With meticulous care, he took the revolver from her and replaced it in his coat. "Try this one." Merritt's brows lifted slightly as he pulled a gun from a cross-draw holster concealed by his coat. This time, Ethan handed the revolver to her without bothering to disassemble it first. "It's loaded, save one chamber," he cautioned. "I put the hammer down to prevent accidental discharge." "A Colt single-action," Merritt said, pleased, admiring the elegant piece, with its four-and-a-half-inch barrel and custom engraving. "Papa has one similar to this." She eased the hammer back and gently rotated the cylinder. "It has a powerful recoil," Ethan warned. "I would expect so." Merritt held the Colt in a practiced grip, the fingers of her support hand fit neatly underneath the trigger guard. "Cover your ears," she said, cocking the hammer and aligning the sights. She squeezed the trigger. An earsplitting report, a flash of light from the muzzle, and one of the rabbit sculptures on the wall shattered. In the silence that followed, Merritt heard her father say dryly, "Go on, Merritt. Put the other bunny out of its misery." She cocked the hammer, aimed and fired again. The second rabbit sculpture exploded. "Sweet Mother Mary," Ethan said in wonder. "I've never seen a woman shoot like that." "My father taught all of us how to shoot and handle firearms safely," Merritt said, giving the revolver back to him grip-first.

The girl who asked me the time lights yet another cigarette. I’m sure it’s not so much the pleasure of the nicotine that makes these girls smoke so much – they hardly puff at their cigarettes – it’s having the thing in their hand to complete the pose. They all smoke with practised ease and naturalism, yet this girl has the gestures off more perfectly than most. How to define it? Some equation of extended fingers and wrist bend, lip-pout and head-tilted exhalation. She smokes with great sexual grace: her body is brown and lean and she’s pretty with long milk-chocolate brown hair. And somehow she knows that her perfect manipulation of that perfect white cylinder of packed tobacco sends a subliminal signal to the boys – all their eyes are flicking like lizards’ – that she is ready.

Después sentía claramente en su oído la vibración de aquella réplica que la había hecho estremecer, que aún la alumbraba, porque las palabras se repetían sin cesar como la pieza de una caja de música, cuyo cilindro, sonada la última nota, da la primera. «¿ Pero qué te has figurado, que mi mujer es como tú? ¿De dónde has sacado esa historia infame? ¿Quién te ha metido en la cabeza esas ideas? Mi mujer es sagrada. Mi mujer no tiene mancilla. Yo no la merezco a ella, y por lo mismo la respeto y la admiro más. Mi mujer, entiéndelo bien, está muy por encima de todas las calumnias. Tengo en ella una fe absoluta, ciega, y ni la más ligera duda puede molestarme. Then she felt vibrating in her ear the reply that had made her tremble and still upset her because the words repeated themselves endlessly, like a music box whose cylinder no sooner strikes the last note than it starts the tune again. "Just what did you think? That my wife is like you? Where did you hear that vile story? Who put those ideas into your head? My wife is sacred. My wife is immaculate. I don't deserve her, and for that very reason I respect and admire her all the more. My wife – get this straight, now – is above any sort of slander. I have absolute, blind faith in her, and not even the slightest doubt could trouble me. Translation: Agnes Moncy Gullón

Somehow, the vault of heaven lay beneath the earth. It was as if they lay against each other, though they were separated by many leagues. How could that be? How could such distant places touch? Hillalum’s head hurt trying to think about it. And then it came to him: a seal cylinder. When rolled upon a tablet of soft clay, the carved cylinder left an imprint that formed a picture. Two figures might appear at opposite ends of the tablet, though they stood side by side on the surface of the cylinder. All the world was as such a cylinder. Men imagined heaven and earth as being at the ends of a tablet, with sky and stars stretched between; yet the world was wrapped around in some fantastic way so that heaven and earth touched.

She heard the ferret come back into the room again, chuckling and hopping as he did whenever he was especially pleased about something. “Go away, Dodger,” she said dully. But he persisted, coming to her side and standing tall again, his body a long cylinder. Glancing at him, Catherine saw that something was clamped carefully in his front teeth. She blinked. Slowly she reached down and took the object from him. Her spectacles. Amazing, how much better a small gesture of kindness could make one feel. “Thank you,” she whispered, tears coming to her eyes as she stroked his tiny head. “I do love you, you disgusting weasel.” Climbing onto her lap, Dodger flipped upside down and sighed.

Everything was blurry. She needed her spectacles. And it was awfully difficult to go looking for something when you couldn't see more than two feet in front of your face. Moreover, if one of the housemaids found the spectacles in Leo's room, or God help her, in his bed, everyone would find out. Abandoning the slipper, Dodger trotted to her and stood tall, bracing his long, slender body against her knee. He was shivering, which Beatrix had told her was normal for ferrets. A ferret's temperature lowered when he was sleeping, and shivering was his way of warming himself upon awakening. Catherine reached down to stroke him. When he tried to climb into her lap, however, she nudged him away. "I don't feel well," she told the ferret woefully, although there was nothing wrong with her physically. Chattering in annoyance at her rejection, Dodger turned and streaked out of the room. Catherine continued to lie with her head on the table, feeling too dreary and ashamed to move. She had slept late. She could hear the sounds of footsteps and muffled conversation coming from the lower floors. Had Leo gone down for breakfast? She couldn't possibly face him. Her mind returned to those blistering minutes of the previous night. A fresh swell of desire rolled through her as she thought of the way he had kissed her, the feel of his mouth on the intimate places of her body. She heard the ferret come back into the room again, chuckling and hopping as he did whenever he was especially pleased about something. "Go away, Dodger," she said dully. But he persisted, coming to her side and standing tall again, his body a long cylinder. Glancing at him, Catherine saw that something was clamped carefully in his front teeth. She blinked. Slowly she reached down and took the object from him. Her spectacles. Amazing, how much better a small gesture of kindness could make one feel. "Thank you," she whispered, tears coming to her eyes as she stroked his tiny head. "I do love you, you disgusting weasel." Climbing onto her lap, Dodger flipped upside down and sighed.

As Devon accompanied her to the second floor, Kathleen became aware of strange ethereal music floating through the air. The delicate notes didn’t come from a piano. “What is that sound?” she asked. Devon shook his head, looking perplexed. They entered the drawing room, where Helen, Cassandra and Pandora had gathered around a small rectangular table. The twins’ faces glowed with excitement, while Helen’s was blank. “Kathleen,” Pandora exclaimed, “it’s the most beautiful, clever thing you’ve ever seen!” She saw a music box that was at least three feet long and a foot tall. The shining rosewood box, decorated with gold and lacquer inlay, rested upon its own matching table. “Let’s try another,” Cassandra urged, opening a drawer in the front of the table. Helen reached into the box to withdraw a brass cylinder, its surface bristling with hundreds of tiny pins. Several more cylinders lay in a gleaming row in the drawer. “You see?” Pandora said to Kathleen excitedly. “Each cylinder plays a different piece of music. You can choose what you want to hear.” Kathleen shook her head, marveling silently. Helen placed a new cylinder in the box and flipped a brass lever. The brisk, jaunty melody of the William Tell Overture poured out, making the twins laugh. “Swiss-made,” Devon remarked, staring at a plaque on the interior of the lid. “The cylinders are all opera overtures. Il Bacio, Zampa,,,” “But where did it come from?” Kathleen asked. “It seems to have been delivered today,” Helen said, her voice oddly subdued. “For me. From…Mr. Winterborne.