Wagon Wheel Quotes

All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts and made up of our thoughts. If a man speak or act with an evil thought, suffering follows him as the wheel follows the hoof of the beast that draws the wagon.... If a man speak or act with a good thought, happiness follows him like a shadow that never leaves him.

Calling it a simple schoolgirl crush was like saying a Rolls-Royce was a vehicle with four wheels, something like a hay-wagon. She did not giggle wildly and blush when she saw him, nor did she chalk his name on trees or write it on the walls of the Kissing Bridge. She simply lived with his face in her heart all the time, a kind of sweet, hurtful ache. She would have died for him..

We join spokes together in a wheel, but it is the center hole that makes the wagon move. We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want. We hammer wood for a house, but it is the inner space that makes it livable. We work with being, but non-being is what we use.

Love is like the little red toy wagon you get for your Christmas or your sixth birthday. It makes you deliriously happy and you just can't leave it alone. But sooner or later the wheels come off. Then you leave it in a corner and forget it. Falling in love is great. Being in love is a disaster

There are so many people who’ve come before us, arrows and wagon wheels, obsidian tools, buffalo. Look out at the meadow, you can almost see them, generations dissolved in the bluegrass and hay. I want to try and be terrific. Even for an hour.

I can’t think of anything more depressing than to be an Egyptian high priest on display next to a set of vintage wagon wheels and a two-headed chicken.

The stuff of nightmare is their plain bread. They butter it with pain. They set their clocks by deathwatch beetles, and thrive the centuries. They were the men with the leather-ribbon whips who sweated up the Pyramids seasoning it with other people's salt and other people's cracked hearts. They coursed Europe on the White Horses of the Plague. They whispered to Caesar that he was mortal, then sold daggers at half-price in the grand March sale. Some must have been lazing clowns, foot props for emperors, princes, and epileptic popes. Then out on the road, Gypsies in time, their populations grew as the world grew, spread, and there was more delicious variety of pain to thrive on. The train put wheels under them and here they run down the log road out of the Gothic and baroque; look at their wagons and coaches, the carving like medieval shrines, all of it stuff once drawn by horses, mules, or, maybe, men.

We've become a nation of indoor cats, he'd said. A nation of doubters, worriers, overthinkers. Thank God these weren't the kind of Americans who settled this country. They were a different breed! They crossed the country in wagons with wooden wheels! People croaked along the way, and they barely stopped. Back then, you buried your dead and kept moving.

All the paths of the Lord are mercy and truth unto such as keep his covenant."] The original Hebrew word that has been translated "paths" means "well-worn roads' or "wheel tracks," such ruts as wagons make when they go down our green roads in wet weather and sink in up to the axles. God's ways are at times like heavy wagon tracks that cut deep into our souls, yet all of them are merciful.

Do none of you ever walk?' I asked, baffled. 'And how do you keep from getting all over mud?" she said. We both looked down. I was a good two inches deep in mud along all the bottom of today's skirt: bigger around than a wagon-wheel and made of purple velvet and silver lace. 'I don't,' I said glumly.

A soul's a sort of a fifth wheel to a wagon.

They devised such useful tools, skills, and techniques as the potter's wheel, the wagon wheel, the plow, the sailboat, the arch, the vault, the dome, casting in copper and bronze, riveting, brazing and soldering, sculpture

The only way to get through life is to laugh your way through it. You either have to laugh or cry. I prefer to laugh. Crying gives me a headache.” “I don't want to drive up to the pearly gates in a shiny sports car, wearing beautifully, tailored clothes, my hair expertly coiffed, and with long, perfectly manicured fingernails. I want to drive up in a station wagon that has mud on the wheels from taking kids to scout camp. I want to be there with a smudge of peanut butter on my shirt from making sandwiches for a sick neighbors children. I want to be there with a little dirt under my fingernails from helping to weed someone's garden. I want to be there with children's sticky kisses on my cheeks and the tears of a friend on my shoulder. I want the Lord to know I was really here and that I really lived.

The tumultuous noise resolved itself now into the disorderly mingling of many voices, the gride of many wheels, the creaking of wagons, and the staccato of hoofs.

So as the summer sun began to rise, the fire began to die, and the bees began to circle overhead, the two men spoke of days from their childhoods when the wagon wheels rattled in the road, and the dragonflies skimmed the grass, and the apple trees blossomed for as far as the eye could see.

Still, this particular fantasy nagged him. He'd stroll through the streets, eat, bathe, weed his rose garden, and it would gather strength over his head, an insidious halo, as black as dried blood, glittering with the thunder of snapping bones. It tugged at him like a tornado. He would peer up and see George affixed to its sphere, and the smog made him think of a woodcut he'd seen as a child. It showed every bone in some man's body broken and woven through spokes of a wagon wheel. Hoisted aloft in the Renaissance, they had continued to twirl for Philippe ever since.

For now they were safe. But despite the rattle of the wagon’s wheels, Inej could tell Kaz’s breathing had gotten worse—shallow, rapid pants like an animal caught in a trap. It was a sound she’d never thought to hear from him. It was because she was listening so closely that she knew the exact moment when Kaz Brekker, Dirtyhands, the bastard of the Barrel and the deadliest boy in Ketterdam, fainted.

Everything was fine with the Zen Lunatics, the nut wagon was too far away to hear us. But there was a wisdom in it all, as you'll see if you take a walk some night on a suburban street and pass house after house on both sides of the street each with the lamplight of the living room, shining golden, and inside the little blue square of the television, each living family riveting its attention on probably one show; nobody talking; silence in the yards; dogs barking at you because you pass on human feet instead of on wheels. You'll see what I mean, when it begins to appear like everybody in the world is soon going to be thinking the same way and the Zen Lunatics have long joined dust, laughter on their dust lips.

All very well for a dull sort of girl to hitch her wheel to a man's wagon, but consider yourself warned, men enjoy a bit of sport, and they all like to catch the brightest prize, but once they do? That's when the fun and games end. His games, her fun.

A big cigar was jammed in the corner of his wide mouth. Blue-gray smoke wafted to the ceiling rafters, curling around the big wagon-wheel chandelier like ghostly tendrils.

As I have often noted, a wagon with spoked wheels doesn’t just carry grain or freight from place to place; it carries the brilliant idea of a wagon with spoked wheels. The

Worst wheel on the wagon makes the most noise.

Hercules And The Wagoner A CARTER was driving a wagon along a country lane, when the wheels sank down deep into a rut. The rustic driver, stupefied and aghast, stood looking at the wagon, and did nothing but utter loud cries to Hercules to come and help him. Hercules, it is said, appeared and thus addressed him: "Put your shoulders to the wheels, my man. Goad on your bullocks, and never more pray to me for help, until you have done your best to help yourself, or depend upon it you will henceforth pray in vain." Self-help is the best help.

The sand lay blue in the moonlight and the iron tires of the wagons rolled among the shapes of the riders in gleaming hoops that veered and wheeled woundedly and vaguely navigational like slender astrolabes and the polished shoes of the horses kept hasping up like a myriad eyes winking across the desert floor. They watched storms out there so distant they could not be heard, the silent lightning flaring sheetwise and the thin black spine of the mountain chain fluttering and sucked away again in the dark. They saw wild horses racing on the plain, pounding their shadows down the night and leaving in the moonlight a vaporous dust like the palest stain of their passing.

Back out of all this now too much for us, Back in a time made simple by the loss Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather, There is a house that is no more a house Upon a farm that is no more a farm And in a town that is no more a town. The road there, if you’ll let a guide direct you Who only has at heart your getting lost, May seem as if it should have been a quarry— Great monolithic knees the former town Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered. And there’s a story in a book about it: Besides the wear of iron wagon wheels The ledges show lines ruled southeast-northwest, The chisel work of an enormous Glacier That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole. You must not mind a certain coolness from him Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain. Nor need you mind the serial ordeal Of being watched from forty cellar holes As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins. As for the woods’ excitement over you That sends light rustle rushes to their leaves, Charge that to upstart inexperience. Where were they all not twenty years ago? They think too much of having shaded out A few old pecker-fretted apple trees. Make yourself up a cheering song of how Someone’s road home from work this once was, Who may be just ahead of you on foot Or creaking with a buggy load of grain. The height of the adventure is the height Of country where two village cultures faded Into each other. Both of them are lost. And if you’re lost enough to find yourself By now, pull in your ladder road behind you And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me. Then make yourself at home. The only field Now left’s no bigger than a harness gall. First there’s the children’s house of make-believe, Some shattered dishes underneath a pine, The playthings in the playhouse of the children. Weep for what little things could make them glad. Then for the house that is no more a house, But only a belilaced cellar hole, Now slowly closing like a dent in dough. This was no playhouse but a house in earnest. Your destination and your destiny’s A brook that was the water of the house, Cold as a spring as yet so near its source, Too lofty and original to rage. (We know the valley streams that when aroused Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.) I have kept hidden in the instep arch Of an old cedar at the waterside A broken drinking goblet like the Grail Under a spell so the wrong ones can’t find it, So can’t get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn’t. (I stole the goblet from the children’s playhouse.) Here are your waters and your watering place. Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.

The Oxen and the Axle-Trees A HEAVY WAGON was being dragged along a country lane by a team of Oxen. The Axle-trees groaned and creaked terribly; whereupon the Oxen, turning round, thus addressed the wheels: "Hullo there! why do you make so much noise? We bear all the labor, and we, not you, ought to cry out." Those who suffer most cry out the least.

In Dostoevsky illness and death were almost always dirty, impoverished affairs. Crushed beneath wagon wheels, mud, typhus, blood-stained handkerchiefs. And so on. But damned if that weren’t preferable to this. Slow disintegration in a polished machine.

His books were in the bookcase, his coloring books on the desk. A place for everything and everything in its place, Mommy said. Then you know where it is when you want it. But now things had been misplaced. Things were missing. Worse still, things had been added, things you couldn’t quite see, like in one of those pictures that said CAN YOU SEE THE INDIANS? And if you strained and squinted, you could see some of them—the thing you had taken for a cactus at first glance was really a brave with a knife clamped in his teeth, and there were others hiding in the rocks, and you could even see one of their evil, merciless faces peering through the spokes of a covered wagon wheel. But you could never see all of them, and that was what made you uneasy. Because it was the ones you couldn’t see that would sneak up behind you, a tomahawk in one hand and a scalping knife in the other …

We sat on the verandah drinking beer before we left, the hotel dark behind us. The moonlight was so strong we could see the grains of white sand glittering individually where it had been flung across the tarmac by the ox-wagon wheels. The heavy-hanging, pointed leaves of the gum-trees shone like tiny spears. I

Nowadays he drove the car into town to fetch his grandfather from habit alone, and though he still considered forty five miles an hour merely cruising speed, he no longer took cold and fiendish pleasure in turning curves on two wheels or in detaching mules from wagons by striking the whiffle-trees with his bumper in passing.

A wasp seated himself upon the head of a Snake and, striking him unceasingly with his stings, wounded him to death. The Snake, being in great torment and not knowing how to rid himself of his enemy, saw a wagon heavily laden with wood, and went and purposely placed his head under the wheels, saying, “At least my enemy and I shall perish together.

No matter though, I know many chaps that hav'n't got any,— good luck to 'em; and they are all the better off for it. A soul's a sort of a fifth wheel to a wagon.

A soul’s a sort of a fifth wheel to a wagon.

For a few moments, the women sat together in companionable quiet, the only sounds that of birdsong and hoofbeats and wagon wheels from outside. The dough rounding between Vienne's palms was smooth and soft, and the sight of the rolls filling the pan Paulette set on the table offered a certain satisfaction. Life remained complex and unreliable, but this was simple and predictable. A comfort.

Yellowtail is a prominent medicine man. He uses a wagon wheel to describe the world’s religions. Each spoke represents different people and religions in the circle of life. All spokes are connected to the same Creator. According to Yellowtail, everyone has a different way to establish a spiritual relationship with God. And they are all valid. It’s up to each person to choose a method that is most effective.

Not that either he or Kaden was lazy. They were both always eager to pitch in, Kaden fixing the wheel on Berdi’s wagon without any prompting, and Rafe proving himself as an experienced farmhand, clearing the trenches in Berdi’s vegetable garden and repairing its sticky sluice gate. Gwyneth and I both watched with more than a little interest as he swung the hoe and lifted heavy rocks to reinforce the channel. Perhaps,

Anyone who has ever canoed on the upper Missouri River knows what a welcome sight a grove of cottonoods can be. They provide shade, shelter, and fuel. For Indian ponies, they provide food. For the Corps of Discovery, they provided wheels, wagons, and canoes. Pioneering Lewis and Clark scholar Paul Russell Cutright pays the cottonwoods an appropriate tribute: 'Of all the wetern trees it contributed more to the success of the Expedition than any other. Lewis and Clark were men of great talent and resourcefulness, masters of ingenuity and improvisation. Though we think it probable that they would hae successfully crossed the continent without the cottonwood, don't as us how!

Baby has the rabbit you gave her last Easter a year ago. In Denver I was afraid my baby would grow up devoid of imagination. Like all the kindergartners, she depended upon others to amuse her. I was very sorry about it, for my castles in Spain have been real homes to me. But there is no fear. She has a block of wood she found in the blacksmith shop which she calls her "dear baby." A spoke out of a wagon wheel is "little Margaret," and a barrel-stave is "bad little Johnny.

Raymond!” his mother said. “You might have put the milk into a jug, for heaven’s sake! We’ve got a guest!” “It’s only Eleanor, Mum,” he said, then looked at me. “You don’t mind, do you?” “Not at all,” I said. “I always use the carton at home too. It’s merely a vessel from which to convey the liquid into the cup; in fact, it’s probably more hygienic than using an uncovered jug, I would have thought.” I reached forward for a Wagon Wheel. Raymond was already chewing on his. The pair of them chatted about inconsequential matters and I settled into the sofa. Neither of them had particularly strident voices, and I listened to the carriage clock on the mantelpiece tick loudly. It was warm, just on the right side of oppressively hot.

The entrance gate at the far end of the quadrangle was open wide, and beyond it I could see a mass of people assembled on the green, men, women, children.The shouting was coming from them, and the creaking sounds were the wheels of an enormous covered wagon drawn by five horses, the second leader and the horse between the shafts carrying riders upon their backs. The wooden canopy

Burrack was a wide place in the road. They shot through it and on the other side was a combination café, store, and gas station. There was an old Ford wagon and a dust-streaked Olds with a horse trailer behind it in the dirt parking lot. The horse stared out at them as Poke wheeled the Connie in. “This looks like just the ticket,” Lloyd said. Poke agreed. He reached into the back for

A driving snow-storm in the night and still raging; five or six inches deep on a level at 7 A.M. All birds are turned into snowbirds. Trees and houses have put on the aspect of winter. The traveller’s carriage wheels, the farmer’s wagon, are converted into white disks of snow through which the spokes hardly appear. But it is good now to stay in the house and read and write. We do not now go wandering all abroad and dissipated, but the imprisoning storm condenses our thoughts. I can hear the clock tick as not in pleasant weather. My life is enriched. I love to hear the wind howl. I have a fancy for sitting with my book or paper in some mean and apparently unfavorable place, in the kitchen, for instance, where the work is going on, rather a little cold than comfortable.

Every morning at dawn the village trembles with the rumbling of the wagons. They come in from everywhere, loaded with saltpeter, with corn, with hay. The wheels creak and creak, rattling the windows and waking up the village. That's the hour when the ovens are opened and the air smells of new-baked bread.Suddenly it thunders, perhaps, and the rain falls. perhaps spring is coming. You'll learn there what 'perhaps' means, my son...

In two days they began to come upon bones and cast-off apparel. They saw halfburied skeletons of mules with the bones so white and polished they seemed incandescent even in that blazing heat and they saw panniers and packsaddles and the bones of men and they saw a mule entire, the dried and blackened carcass hard as iron. They rode on. The white noon saw them through the waste like a ghost army, so pale they were with dust, like shades of figures erased upon a board. The wolves loped paler yet and grouped and skittered and lifted their lean snouts on the air. At night the horses were fed by hand from sacks of meal and watered from buckets. There was no more sickness. The survivors lay quietly in that cratered void and watched the whitehot stars go rifling down the dark. Or slept with their alien hearts beating in the sand like pilgrims exhausted upon the face of the planet Anareta, clutched to a namelessness wheeling in the night. They moved on and the iron of the wagontires grew polished bright as chrome in the pumice. To the south the blue cordilleras stood footed in their paler image on the sand like reflections in a lake and there were no wolves now. They took to riding by night, silent jornadas save for the trundling of the wagons and the wheeze of the animals. Under the moonlight a strange party of elders with the white dust thick on their moustaches and their eyebrows. They moved on and the stars jostled and arced across the firmament and died beyond the inkblack mountains. They came to know the nightskies well. Western eyes that read more geometric constructions than those names given by the ancients. Tethered to the polestar they rode the Dipper round while Orion rose in the southwest like a great electric kite. The sand lay blue in the moonlight and the iron tires of the wagons rolled among the shapes of the riders in gleaming hoops that veered and wheeled woundedly and vaguely navigational like slender astrolabes and the polished shoes of the horses kept hasping up like a myriad of eyes winking across the desert floor. They watched storms out there so distant they could not be heard, the silent lightning flaring sheetwise and the thin black spine of the mountain chain fluttering and sucked away again in the dark. They saw wild horses racing on the plain, pounding their shadows down the night and leaving in the moonlight a vaporous dust like the palest stain of their passing.

Great diggings and foundations spread across what had been the Warders’ practice yard, tall wooden cranes and stacks of cut marble and granite. Masons and laborers swarmed over the workings like ants, and endless streams of wagons trailed through the gates onto the Tower grounds, bringing more stone. To one side stood a wooden “working model,” as the masons called it, big enough for men to enter crouching on their heels and see every detail, where every stone should go. Most of the workmen could not read, after all—neither words nor mason’s drawn plans. The “working model” was as large as some manor houses. When any king or queen had a palace, why should the Amyrlin Seat be relegated to apartments little better than those of many ordinary sisters? Her palace would match the White Tower for splendor, and have a great spire ten spans higher than the Tower itself. The blood had drained from the chief mason’s face when he heard that. The Tower had been Ogier-built, with assistance from sisters using the Power. One look at Elaida’s face, however, set Master Lerman bowing and stammering that of course all would be done as she wished. As if there had been any question. Her mouth tightened with exasperation. She had wanted Ogier masons again, but the Ogier were confining themselves to their stedding for some reason. Her summons to the nearest, Stedding Jentoine, in the Black Hills, had been met with refusal. Polite, yet still refusal, without explanation, even to the Amyrlin Seat.

Outrageously clever people are worse, but quite a few of them mean well, and often they tend to have disadvantages (of appearance, manner, social skill) that allow you to forgive them. Beautiful people, though, I struggle with. Unless you keep your eyes shut or look the other way, you can’t help but have the awful fact ground into you, like the wheel of a heavy wagon running over your neck, that here is someone divided from you by a vast, unbridgeable gap, and they’ve done absolutely nothing to deserve it.

Beautiful people, though, I struggle with. Unless you keep your eyes shut or look the other way, you can’t help but have the awful fact ground into you, like the wheel of a heavy wagon running over your neck, that here is someone divided from you by a vast, unbridgeable gap, and they’ve done absolutely nothing to deserve it. Ogus’s wife – her name was Sichelgaita – was that level of beauty. I won’t even try to describe her, because they don’t make words that could take the strain. You felt ashamed to look at her.

A small smudge over there—the bird cruised down to see, hopeful, hungry. But he was disappointed; the smudge did not move. For it was an arm, sticking out of the snow, attached to a body buried beneath. Another odd blot of lifelessness, another, another—the bird took it all in from his aerial vantage point. A yellow hat atop a grey head, eyes frozen shut. A hand, poking out of a drift; a child’s hand, so small, so white, a deathly white, paler than the snow. A wagon wheel, a pale blue dress fluttering out of its spokes, and inside that dress, a lifeless female body. Clothing fluttered, moving, tricking the hawk time and again into thinking it had found its breakfast. Clothing blown off bodies that were now naked to the elements, like the one over there, only a few heartbreaking steps away from a barn. And more small hands, feet, faces upturned, eyes shut tight. That deathly pallor, blue grey against the dazzling white snow. The hawk turned northward, hoping for better hunting grounds. But he was doomed to be disappointed on this cold, sunny morning.

The number of ways in which their children might come to harm along the trail was staggering . . . Children fell under wagon wheels and were crushed to death or crippled for life. They wandered off into the tall grass and were never seen again. Occasionally they were abducted by Native Americans. Much more frequently they drowned when swept away by rivers their families were trying to ford. Drowning incidents were so common, in fact, that some mothers wrote their children's names in indelible ink on labels and sewed the labels into their children's clothes. It didn't prevent them from drowning, but it sometimes allowed a grieving mother to identify a body that had been in the water for too long. Children were bitten by rattlesnakes, struck by lightning, trampled by unruly oxen or horses, pummeled by hailstones as large as turkey eggs, and shot by the nearly daily accidental discharges of the guns that their fathers carried. They died of measles, diphtheria, whooping cough, influenza, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, malaria, infected cuts, food poisoning, mumps, and smallpox.

(It’s a doozy! I could listen to it all day long.) Nikki Lane—“Gone, Gone, Gone,” “Coming Home to You” Patterson Hood—“Belvedere,” “Back of a Bible” Ryan Bingham—“Guess Who’s Knocking” American Aquarium—“Casualties” Devil Doll—“The Things You Make Me Do” American Aquarium—“I’m Not Going to the Bar” Hank Williams Jr.—“Family Tradition” David Allan Coe—“Mama Tried” John Paul Keith—“She’ll Dance to Anything” Carl Perkins—“Honey, Don’t” Scott H. Biram—“Lost Case of Being Found” The Cramps—“The Way I Walk” The Reverend Horton Heat—“Jimbo Song” Justin Townes Earle—“Baby’s Got a Bad Idea” Old Crow Medicine Show—“Wagon Wheel,” “Hard to Love” Dirty River Boys—“My Son” JD McPherson—“Wolf Teeth” Empress of Fur—“Mad Mad Bad Bad Mama” Dwight Yoakam—“Little Sister” The Meteors—“Psycho for Your Love” Hayes Carll—“Love Don’t Let Me Down” HorrorPops—“Dotted with Hearts” Buddy Holly—“Because I Love You” Chris Isaak—“Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing” Jason Isbell—“The Devil Is My Running Mate” Lindi Ortega—“When All the Stars Align” Three Bad Jacks—“Scars” Kasey Anderson and the Honkies—“My Blues, My Love

He hated the Ku Klux Klan. I’m real proud of that. One day when he was farming he heard that some of them were trying to organize in the area. He put his shotgun in the back of his wagon and found a bunch of ’em on the porch of the general store. He went right up and said, “Excuse me, sirs, but have any of you all seen any of them goddamn Ku Kluxers?” No one said anything, so Grandpaw prompted ’em a little. “Those sorry sheet-wearin’ sons of bitches.” They still didn’t say a word. “Well, if you see any of them Ku Kluxers, you tell ’em Wheeler Wilson’s looking for ’em, and you can tell ’em where I live.

Camelot—Camelot," said I to myself.  "I don't seem to remember hearing of it before.  Name of the asylum, likely." It was a soft, reposeful summer landscape, as lovely as a dream, and as lonesome as Sunday.  The air was full of the smell of flowers, and the buzzing of insects, and the twittering of birds, and there were no people, no wagons, there was no stir of life, nothing going on.  The road was mainly a winding path with hoof-prints in it, and now and then a faint trace of wheels on either side in the grass—wheels that apparently had a tire as broad as one's hand. Presently a fair slip of a girl, about ten years old, with a cataract of golden hair streaming down over her shoulders, came along. Around her head she wore a hoop of flame-red poppies. It was as sweet an outfit as ever I saw, what there was of it.  She walked indolently along, with a mind at rest, its peace reflected in her innocent face.  The circus man paid no attention to her; didn't even seem to see her.  And she—she was no more startled at his fantastic make-up than if she was used to his like every day of her life.  She was going by as indifferently as she might have gone by a couple of cows; but when she happened to notice me, then there was a change!  Up went her hands, and she was turned to stone;

There is a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen about a soldier who is going through a forest. He meets an old woman who gives him a magic apron and sends him down into a deep shaft. He finds rooms of treasure as he goes deeper and deeper—each treasure greater than the last and each treasure guarded by a terrifying dog, each dog with larger eyes. The first one has eyes as big as saucers; the last one has eyes as big as wagon wheels. He does as the old woman told him: spreads out the apron, picks up each dog and puts it on the apron, and this makes him safe. In the first room he finds copper and fills his pockets. In the second room he finds silver and has to empty his pockets of copper to make room for silver. In the third room he finds gold and has to throw away the silver in order to gather the greater treasure. This tale is a metaphor for the process of making art. There is danger in going down into the unknown. What we will find there, in the unconscious where creation happens, may call for all our skill, all our intuition. It may change us; it may redefine our lives. But I believe we have no other choice if we are to be artist/writers. The act of writing is a tremendous adventure into the unknown, always fraught with danger. But the deeper you go and the longer you work at your art, the greater will be your treasure.

your old grandfather, you know, who died before you were born—he used to say to me, ‘Learn all you can, John, about anything and everything. There is no telling when a chance may pop up for you to use what you thought you never would use.’ It’s a good rule. I practiced on it once when I saw a man making a wagon. I watched just how he fixed the wheel and the holes for the nails, and everything, and I said, right out loud, ‘It isn’t anyways likely that I shall ever make a wagon, but then I might as well know how to do it. And it wasn’t a week after that we broke down going across the prairie, your mother and me and two children; and if I hadn’t known just how to fix that wheel we would have frozen to death likely enough before we could get anywhere.

Their degeneration was even more rapid than their rise. Astyages, who succeeded his father Cyaxares, proved again that monarchy is a gamble, in whose royal succession great wits and madness are near allied. He inherited the kingdom with equanimity, and settled down to enjoy it. Under his example the nation forgot its stern morals and stoic ways; wealth had come too suddenly to be wisely used. The upper classes became the slaves of fashion and luxury, the men wore embroidered trousers, the women covered themselves with cosmetics and jewelry, the very horses were often caparisoned in gold.7 These once simple and pastoral people, who had been glad to be carried in rude wagons with wheels cut roughly out of the trunks of trees,8 now rode in expensive chariots from feast to feast.

Marlboro Man was out of town, on a trip to the southern part of the state, looking at farm ground, the night I began conceiving of the best way to arrange the reception menu. I was splayed on my bed in sweats, staring at the ceiling, when suddenly I gave birth to The Idea: one area of the country club would be filled with gold bamboo chairs, architecturally arranged orchids and roses, and antique lace table linens. Violins would serenade the guests as they feasted on cold tenderloin and sipped champagne. Martha Stewart would be present in spirit and declare, “This is my daughter, whom I love. In her I am well pleased.” Martha’s third cousin Mabel would prefer the ballroom on the other end of the club, however, which would be the scene of an authentic chuck wagon spread: barbecue, biscuits and gravy, fried chicken, Coors Light. Blue-checkered tablecloths would adorn the picnic tables, a country band would play “All My Exes Live in Texas,” and wildflowers would fill pewter jugs throughout the room. I smiled, imagining the fun. In one fell swoop, our two worlds--Marlboro Man’s country and my country club--would collide, combine, and unite in a huge, harmonious feast, one that would officially usher in my permanent departure from city life, cappuccino, and size 6 clothes.

Eddie: What has four wheels and flies? Blaine: (disapproving) THE TOWN GARBAGE WAGON, AS I HAVE ALREADY SAID. ARE YOU SO STUPID OR INATTENTIVE THAT YOU DO NOT REMEMBER? IT WAS THE FIRST RIDDLE YOU ASKED ME. Eddie: (in his mind) Yes. And what we all missed--because we were fixated on stumping you with some brain-buster out of Roland's past or Jake's book--is that the contest almost ended right there. (to Blaine) You didn't like that one, did you, Blaine? Blaine: (agreeably) I FOUND IT EXCEEDINGLY STUPID. PERHAPS THAT'S WHY YOU ASKED IT AGAIN. LIKE CALLS TO LIKE, EDDIE OF NEW YORK, IS IT NOT SO? Eddie: (smiling and shaking his finger) Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. Or, as we used to say back in the neighborhood, 'You can rank me to the dogs and back, but I'll never lose the hard-on I use to fuck your mother.' Jake: Hurry up! If you can do something, DO IT! Eddie: It doesn't like silly questions. It doesn't like silly games. And we KNEW that. We knew it from Charlie the Choo-Choo. How stupid can you get? Hell, THAT was the book with the answers, not Riddle-De-Dum, but we never saw it. (to Blaine) Blaine: when is a door not a door? Blaine: (clicking his tongue) WHEN IT'S AJAR, OF COURSE. WOULD YOU DIE WITH SUCH STUPID RIDDLES IN YOUR MOUTH?

Susannah smiled at them nervously, then looked up at the route-map. "Hello, Blaine." "HOWDY, SUSANNAH OF NEW YORK." Her heart was pounding, her armpits were damp, and here was something she had first discovered way back in the first grade: it was hard to begin. It was hard to stand up in front of the class and be first with your song, your joke, your report on how you spent your summer vacation ... or your riddle, for that matter. The one she had decided upon was one from Jake Chambers's crazed English essay, which he had recited to them almost verbatim during their long palaver after leaving the old people of River Crossing. The essay, titled "My Understanding of Truth," had contained two riddles, one of which Eddie had already used on Blaine. "SUSANNAH? ARE YOU THERE, L'IL COWGIRL?" Teasing again, but this time the teasing sounded light, good-natured. Good-humored. Blaine could be charming when he got what he wanted. Like certain spoiled children she had known. "Yes, Blaine, I am, and here is my riddle. What has four wheels and flies?" There was a peculiar click, as if Blaine were mimicking the sound of a man popping his tongue against the roof of his mouth. It was followed by a brief pause. When Blaine replied, most of the jocularity had gone out of his voice. "THE TOWN GARBAGE WAGON, OF COURSE. A CHILD'S RIDDLE. IF THE REST OF YOUR RIDDLES ARE NO BETTER, I WILL BE EXTREMELY SORRY I SAVED YOUR LIVES FOR EVEN A SHORT WHILE.

Across our country, rather than slavery having ended, it has spread horridly. So that no matter our color of skin, our creed or persuasion, or our just labors - our industry, our security, our very lives of our sons and daughters, are being taken from us, as our families are harmed, by a small group of elite and power hungry persons. And those institutions, established for our protection, are employed now, in this very country, for our subjugation, right down to local police. Well paid and infiltrated by the powers wielding unthinkable agendas. Let my family and its journey of hardship be living proof, that those of us that stand up for all, currently suffer the stones of those that stand only for themselves, and who now stand with hand on triggers, having silenced all but a few voices, who have paid the ultimate price for daring to speak. For daring to "face down", the few that have systematically and immorally bought, and criminally raised, this specter of a most vile, ancient and hated institution, once more, upon us. When elections come, know they are being held on a broken wagon, whose wheels need fixed, and safeguards restored, that the precious innocents of all races, all persuasions, all lives, may finally have safety, peace, protection and most of all justice. We are being told now we have won, but my family still feels the sting and the weight of the chains. We vow as we break ours, to free others. To use what we may gain in restitution, to the freeing and restoring of others yet bound.

can hardly blame ye for not waiting.” I could see Ian in profile, leaning over the log basket. His long, good-natured face wore a slight frown. “Weel, I didna think it right, especially wi’ me being crippled …” There was a louder snort. “Jenny couldna have a better husband, if you’d lost both legs and your arms as well,” Jamie said gruffly. Ian’s pale skin flushed slightly in embarrassment. Jamie coughed and swung his legs down from the hassock, leaning over to pick up a scrap of kindling that had fallen from the basket. “How did ye come to wed anyway, given your scruples?” he asked, one side of his mouth curling up. “Gracious, man,” Ian protested, “ye think I had any choice in the matter? Up against a Fraser?” He shook his head, grinning at his friend. “She came up to me out in the field one day, while I was tryin’ to mend a wagon that sprang its wheel. I crawled out, all covered wi’ muck, and found her standin’ there looking like a bush covered wi’ butterflies. She looks me up and down and she says—” He paused and scratched his head. “Weel, I don’t know exactly what she said, but it ended with her kissing me, muck notwithstanding, and saying, ‘Fine, then, we’ll be married on St. Martin’s Day.’ ” He spread his hands in comic resignation. “I was still explaining why we couldna do any such thing, when I found myself in front of a priest, saying, ‘I take thee, Janet’… and swearing to a lot of verra improbable statements.” Jamie rocked back in his seat, laughing. “Aye, I ken the feeling,” he said. “Makes ye feel a bit hollow, no?” Ian smiled, embarrassment forgotten. “It does and all. I still get that feeling, ye know, when I see Jenny sudden, standing against the sun on the hill, or holding wee Jamie, not lookin’ at me. I see her, and I think, ‘God, man, she can’t be yours, not really.’ ” He shook his head, brown hair flopping over his brow. “And then she turns and smiles at me …” He looked up at his brother-in-law, grinning. “Weel, ye know yourself. I can see it’s the same wi’ you and your Claire. She’s … something special, no?” Jamie nodded. The smile didn’t leave his face, but altered somehow. “Aye,” he said softly. “Aye, she is that.” Over the port and biscuits, Jamie and

You look beautiful,” my dad said as he walked over to me and offered his arm. His voice was quiet--even quieter than his normal quiet--and it broke, trailed off, died. I took his arm, and together we walked forward, toward the large wooden doors that led to the beautiful sanctuary where I’d been baptized as a young child just after our family joined the Episcopal church. Where I’d been confirmed by the bishop at the age of twelve. I’d worn a Black Watch plaid Gunne Sax dress that day. It had delicate ribbon trim and a lace-up tie in the back--a corset-style tie, which, I realized, foreshadowed the style of my wedding gown. I looked through the windows and down the aisle and could see myself kneeling there, the bishop’s wrinkled, weathered hands on my auburn hair. I shivered with emotion, feeling the sting in my nose…and the warm beginnings of nostalgia-driven tears. Biting my bottom lip, I stepped forward with my father. Connell had started walking down the aisle as the organist began playing “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” I could close my eyes and hear the same music playing on the eight-track tape player in my mom’s Oldsmobile station wagon. Was it the London Symphony Orchestra or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir? I suddenly couldn’t remember. But that’s why I’d chosen it for the processional--not because it appeared on Modern Bride’s list of acceptable wedding processionals, but because it reminded me of childhood…of Bach…of home. I watched as Becky followed Connell, and then my sister, Betsy, her almost jet-black hair shining in the beautiful light of the church. I was so glad to have a sister. Ms. Altar Guild gently coaxed my father and me toward the door. “It’s time,” she whispered. My stomach fell. What was happening? Where was I? Who was I? At that very moment, my worlds were colliding--the old world with the new, the past life with the future. I felt my dad inhale deeply, and I followed his lead. He was nervous; I could feel it. I was nervous, too. As we took our place in the doorway, I squeezed his arm and whispered, “I love thee.” It was our little line. “I love thee, too,” he whispered back. And as I turned my head toward the front of the church, my eyes went straight to him--to Marlboro Man, who was standing dead ahead, looking straight at me.

The new Republican Party was formed to denounce the act and stop the expansion of slavery, and the abolitionists began to clean their rifles and grease their wagon wheels.

beautiful granddaughter at his side, guarding it like a pair of faithful watchdogs. Although they were all nearly at the end of their tether, Jim roused the camp again before dawn. Using a span of oxen, and with much shouting and cracking of long whips, they heaved the overturned wagon back on to its wheels. The robust vehicle had suffered little damage, and within a few hours they had repacked its scattered load. Jim knew that they must leave the battlefield at once. In the heat of the sun the corpses would very soon putrefy, and, with the stench of their rotting, sickness and disease would come. At his orders they inspanned every other wagon in the train. Then Smallboy and the other drivers fired the long whips and the oxen trundled the vehicles out of the gruesome laager and into the open grassland. They set up camp that evening among the deserted thatched huts of the Nguni town, surrounded by the vast herds of humpbacked cattle, with the piles of ivory securely enclosed within the wagon laager. The next morning, after breakfast, Jim summoned all his men to the indaba. He wanted to explain to them his future plans, and to tell them where he would lead them next. First he asked Tegwane to explain how the Nguni used their cattle to carry the ivory when they were on the march. ‘Tell us how they place the loads, and secure them to the backs of the animals,’ Jim ordered. ‘That I do not know,’ Tegwane admitted. ‘I have only watched their advance from afar.’ ‘Smallboy will be able to work out the harness for himself,’ Jim decided, ‘but it would have been better to use a method to which the cattle are accustomed.’ Then he turned to the small group of herd-boys and said, ‘Can you men’ – they liked to be called men and they had earned the right at the barricades – ‘can you men take care of so many?’ They considered the vast herds of cattle that were scattered down the full length of the valley. ‘They are not so very many,’ said the eldest, who was the spokesman. ‘We can herd many more than that,’ said another. ‘We have vanquished the Nguni in battle,’ squeaked Izeze, smallest and cheekiest of the boys, his voice not yet broken. ‘We can take care of their cattle, and their women also, when we capture them.

That was a big misunderstanding. The Indians thought that the white man’s God had powerful medicine, to be able to give white people guns and pots and wheeled wagons and thousands of beads and mirrors and far-seeing telescopes and other wonders. They wanted to get such great medicine for themselves. What they were after was material, not spiritual.

When Brad Bird was directing The Incredibles, he had a recurring anxiety dream. In this dream, he was driving down a winding and precarious stretch of highway in a rickety old station wagon, with no one else in the car. Apparently, it was up to him to pilot the vehicle. “But I was in the backseat!” he says. “For some reason, I still had a steering wheel, but my visibility was terrible because of where I was sitting. Basically, all I could do is say to myself, ‘Don’t crash! Don’t crash! Don’t crash!’ ” The takeaway, as he puts it: “Sometimes, as a director, you’re driving. And other times, you’re letting the car drive.

Cool Dust" A heave of afternoon light pulls a tulip from the turf, a bower for locusts, a cup of shells. The farmhouse tilts, a bent shadow on wheels. In cedar rooms a family is molded, silent, wrapped in the wire of steel eyes and stopped voice, romantic ash. This is not my house, my ghost, my uninvited guest, my lost labor of love, my thicket or grease, my JPEG gessoed or rawhide suit. The yellow light throbs like an internal organ — soft body of an overture to insect sounds — sapling of a new world — whose future awaits me at the tilting window of my own domestic hut. Perhaps this is my mesh of hours, my muscular ache, my guardian sash, twist of rope carved around an old maple trunk, my rod of power red with anticipatory friction at the edge of an emerging set of planetary rings. Stained ochre by the air I pitch forward, a vanilla-scented pear that floats or falls. In the rattan chair on the front porch by the blistered boards of the front door a figure of tar watches. Cool dust sparkles and settles. Shadows have made me visible. An empty wagon flares on the hillside.

Armorers wheeled bombs out to the Tu-4 on carts made of steel tubing with rubber tires. Watching them, Boris Gribkov remembered that the groundcrew men at airstrips during the Great Patriotic War hadn’t had such elegant transportation for their high explosives and incendiaries. They’d used whatever they could, sometimes panje wagons, sometimes raw muscle, to get bombs to the bombers. Anton Presnyakov was thinking along with him. “I’ve seen pictures of carts like that at American airstrips in England,” the copilot said. “Now that you mention it, so have I,” Boris replied. “Well, if we can borrow the design for the bomber, no reason we can’t borrow the design for the cart that feeds it, eh?” “We didn’t borrow. We invented,” Lev Vaksman said. “Comrade Reguspatoff is a very clever fellow.” “Reguspatoff?” Boris echoed, puzzled. It sounded as if it ought to be a Russian name, but it wasn’t one he’d ever heard before. “Of course.” The flight engineer’s eyes twinkled. “It’s the abbreviation the Americans put on things they make. It stands for Registered—U.S. Patent Office.

Creativity in business is often nothing more than making connections that everyone else has almost thought of. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, just attach it to a new wagon.

Strangling fear surged up his throat. Amy, skirts flying, blond hair a gleaming target, was running in a straight line for the wagons, Loretta right behind her. Between the opposing forces. The white, spying the women, had stopped shooting, but in his peripheral vision Hunter saw a brave aim his rifle. “Ka, no!” Hunter zigzagged his mount into the man’s line of fire. “No!” With a vicious kick, Hunter sent his black into a mighty forward lunge, gaining several yards on the advancing warriors, many of whom were from another band. They wouldn’t recognize Amy or Loretta. Unless Hunter could stop the shooting, his woman and her little sister would be killed. When he felt certain everyone in the formation could see him, he wheeled his horse to face them and lifted his rifle high overhead, signaling a cease-fire. Still trailing Amy, Loretta spotted Hunter the moment his horse drew out in front of the others. Heaving for air, she stumbled to a stop and glanced over her shoulder. Hunter, broad back to the wagons, sat tall on his stallion, waving his rifle above his head. As if in a dream, she whirled. The sight of Hunter making a target of himself would be painted in full color across the canvas of her mind for the rest of her life.

the three of us would meet the Wagon Wheel group at the Dinky Donut, where they would have dessert and we would have dinner. I’d brought along a copy of Mein Kampf for that segment of the evening.

The great American innovation in congregation is to turn it into a consumer enterprise. We Americans have developed a culture of acquisition, an economy that is dependent on wanting more, requiring more. We have a huge advertising industry designed to stir up appetites we didn't even know we had. We are insatiable. It didn't take long for some of our Christian brothers and sisters to develop consumer congregations. If we have a nation of consumers, obviously the quickest and most effective way to get them into our congregations is to identify what they want and offer it to them, satisfy their fantasies, promise them the moon, recast the gospel in consumer terms: entertainment, satisfaction, excitement, adventure, problem-solving, whatever. This is the language we Americans grow up on, the language we understand. We are the world's champion consumers, so why shouldn't we have state-of-the-art consumer churches? Given the conditions prevailing in our culture, this is the best and most effective way that has ever been devised for gathering large and prosperous congregations. Americans lead the world in showing how to do it. There is only one thing wrong: this is not the way in which God brings us into conformity with the life of Jesus and sets us on the way of Jesus' salvation. This is not the way in which we become less and Jesus becomes more. This is not the way in which our sacrificed lives become available to others in justice and service. The cultivation of consumer spirituality is the antithesis of a sacrificial, "deny yourself" congregation. A consumer church is an antichrist church. We can't gather a God-fearing, God-worshiping congregation by cultivating a consumer-pleasing, commodity-oriented congregation. When we do, the wheels start falling off the wagon. And they are falling off the wagon. We can't suppress the Jesus way in order to sell the Jesus truth. The Jesus way and the Jesus truth must be congruent. Only when the Jesus way is organically joined with the Jesus truth do we get the Jesus life.

Using the delicate cloth like a handkerchief to protect the brittle pages, she opened the first book she had unearthed: On Dragons. "Oh, how wonderful!" she murmured to herself, gazing at the wildly colored illustrations of giant reptiles, winged and breathing fire. The Chaucerian English was going to take some work to decipher. She would have to see what reference texts she could find in the collection to help her work out the captions, but for now, the pictures fascinated her. The next page showed a silver-armored knight astride a galloping white steed. Armed with a lance, he was shown charging at the hideous, horned dragon that loomed over him, its black, batlike wings outstretched. The knight in the picture had a winged ally of his own, however. In the sky above him hovered none other than St. Michael the Archangel again, her old friend from the duke's family chapel. Come to think of it, she mused, wasn't that white Maltese cross on the little knight's pennant another detail she had noticed in the chapel? She turned the page and stopped at the next colorful picture of a dragon holding its egg in its claws. Some sort of curious symbol was depicted inside the rounded contours of the egg. Kate furrowed her brow and leaned closer, studying the symbol on the dragon's egg. A tingle of faint recognition ran down her spine. I've seen this before. The symbol showed an eight-spoked wagon wheel, with a flaming torch in the center. Beneath the wheel was the Latin motto, Non serviam. Easy enough to translate: "I will not serve.

If I ask you to do something for me will you do it?’ She frowned. ‘Well, I’d have to know what this mysterious “something” was, wouldn’t I? I mean, if it was just, “Pass me one of those Wagon Wheels,” you know the ones that you’ve got stashed in the door shelf here – I’m impressed by the way, I had you down as more of a spinach-protein shake kind of a guy – then okay. But if it’s something of a more morally dubious nature – say, “Make a snuff film graphically depicting the gruesome deaths of two enraged male hedgehogs allowed to tear each other apart in a territorial dispute over a Tangle Teaser liberally doused with female hedgehog pheromones,” or, “Vote UKIP in the upcoming by-election” – then no, I wouldn’t be on board.’ He stared at her for a moment, a heavy feeling settling in his chest as he realized just how much she meant to him, how far he would be willing to go to keep her from any form of pain.

The method by which habits are formed may be compared with the method by which a ‘rut’ is cut in a dirt road by the wheels of a wagon. One time over, the road makes a slight indenture in the dirt. A second trip makes a deeper indenture, and so on, until finally the ‘rut’ becomes so deep that when once the wheels fall into it, they are guided by it. Finally, if unattended, the ‘rut’ becomes a small gulley so great as to impede progress entirely.

TEN GREAT ROAD TRIP SONGS •   “Glory Bound” Martin Sexton •   “Willin’ ” Little Feat •   “Stickshifts and Safetybelts” Cake •   “Radar Love” Golden Earring •   “On the Road Again” Willie Nelson •   “Going Up the Country” Canned Heat •   “Miracle Mile” Cold War Kids •   “Ramblin’ Man” The Allman Brothers Band •   “Thunder Road” Bruce Springsteen •   “Wagon Wheel” Old Crow Medicine Show

Mind is the forerunner of all things. Speak or act with an impure mind, suffering follows as the wagon wheel follows the hoof of the ox.     Mind is the forerunner of all things. Speak or act with peaceful mind, happiness follows like a shadow that never leaves.

No wagon keeps the same wheels forever.

The instant the brake was set, Tori stood and set about climbing down from the bench. Unfortunately, the freight wagon stood several feet taller than the wagons she was accustomed to, and since she had to exit backward, her right foot groped for a wheel spoke with no success. Wonderful. Nothing like making a competent first impression. She adjusted her grip on the seat back and stretched her toe down a little farther, not liking the feeling of falling that assailed her when her shoe failed to connect to anything solid. Twisting her head sideways to better gauge her aim, she stretched a little farther. Where was that confounded spoke? Her palms began to perspire, and her grip grew slick. She slipped downward. A desperate prayer for help soared from her spirit at the same instant a pair of very large, very strong, very warm hands pressed into her waist. He didn’t say a word. No teasing comment whispered in her ear. No flirtation. Just a firm grasp and a smooth descent to the ground. The next instant he was gone, busying himself with the horses. A perfectly gentlemanly action that no one would think twice about.

Then came on a thaw for three or four days, with really warm weather, when everything melted; when the streams burst their bonds; when the earth became soft until it seemed to have no bottom and mud reigned supreme. It was everywhere; the roads were almost impassable and it was difficult to haul the rations to camp from the station. A detail of seventy-five was made from the Seventeenth to assist the brigade wagons back to camp. It was a cheerless task. The heavy army wagons came toiling laboriously along; many became stalled in the mud, the wheels sunken below the hubs, horses straining, the drivers cursing and lashing the poor animals, while a dozen men pushed at each wheel, all and everything covered with the liquid mire; such was December in Virginia. The Christmas of 1862 was cheerless indeed; the weather was frightful, and a heavy snowstorm covered everything a foot deep. Each soldier attempted to get a dinner in honor of the day, and those to whom boxes had been sent succeeded to a most respectable degree, but those unfortunates whose homes were outside the lines had nothing whatever delectable partaking of the nature of Christmas. Well! it would have puzzled [anyone] to furnish a holiday dinner out of a pound of fat pork, six crackers, and a quarter of a pound of dried apples. We all had apple dumplings that day, which with sorghum molasses were not to be despised. Some of the men became decidedly hilarious, and then again some did not; not because they had joined the temperance society nor because they were opposed to the use of intoxicating liquors, but because not a soul invited them to step up and partake. One mess in the Seventeenth did not get so much as a smell during the whole of the holidays; and a dry, dismal old time it proved. We read in the Richmond papers of the thousands and thousands of boxes that had been passed en route to the army, sent by the ladies of Richmond and other cities, but few found their way to us. The greater part of them were for the troops from the far South who were too distant from their homes to receive anything from their own families. The Virginians were supposed to have been cared for by their own relatives and friends; but some of them were not, as we all know.

And when he sowed, some seeds fell by the wayside.” — Matthew 13:4 How are human hearts beaten into a highway? A child’s heart is sensitive to every impression. But as it grows older, the thousand influences, feelings, emotions, imaginations, treading over it continuously, trample it into hardness. Every time a young man feels conviction of sin and does not turn from the sin, his heart is left a little less tender. Every time he feels that he ought to do a certain thing and does not do it, allowing the good impulse to pass, he is left a little less sensitive to good impressions afterward. The same effect is produced by the common experiences of life. The wheels and carts of business go lumbering over the heart. We ought to have our hearts fenced in, and allow none of these heavy wagons to pass over them. A business man ought to keep his heart soft and warm in the midst of all his business, tender as a little child’s, humble, teachable, loving, trusting. He ought to have a sanctuary in his inner life into which no unhallowed foot, none but the priestly feet of heavenly guests, should ever pass. But too many make their hearts an open common, till they are beaten into a callousness that nothing can impress. Another way is by the feet of sinful habits. There was an old legend of a goblin horseman that galloped over men’s fields at night; and wherever his foot struck, the soil was so blasted that nothing would ever grow on it again. So is it with the heart over which the beastly feet of lust, of sensuality, of greed, of selfishness, of passion, are allowed to tread. There is an impression that it does young people no harm to indulge in sin for a time, if they afterward repent. No more fatal falsehood was ever whispered by the tempter into any ear. The heart that is trodden over by vile lusts or indulgences of any kind is never the same again.

The ride to Mineral Point, usually so enjoyable, had turned into a trip through Hell itself. Jake had done well, finding every soft, thick blanket he could find and making a decent bed in the wagon, but the journey was still tortuous for Kate. Every time the wheel hit a bump in the road, bouncing the passengers like dice in a cup, she cried out. While Mary and Becky tended to her in the back, constantly replacing the cold compress on her forehead and shielding her from the early morning sun, Sam drove the horses as hard as he dared. On the rare moments when he did throw a quick glance back at the women, Kate was obscured by the red parasol that Mary held over her. It was probably for the best. He already had a hard enough time trying to concentrate on the road, what with the memory of his girl convulsing on the dirt floor of his cabin.

For it was axiomatic to a certain type of twentieth-century Social Democrat that a badly-equipped and therefore ineffective army was somehow less immoral than one that did its job well. It was further held that due to this deliberate oversight, an inevitably slavish dependence upon multilateral institutions would somehow take up the resultant political slack. The heavy cost of this point of view is seldom borne, either directly or immediately, by its proponents; one thinks like a sovereign nation-state, or one does not. When the wheels fall off the wagon of policy, the armed services often pay the price.

It was a spider as large as a wagon wheel, black as slate.

There were tiny loaves for dolls, and warm dinner rolls, and long French bread, and braided rings of bread, and thick loaves as big and round as wagon wheels, and even entire wheat-colored cottages of crusty bread which when you lived in them were more like yeasty caves in a gigantic mountain of bread, and all you had to do in order to feed your self in heaven was pull a hank of soft, moist bread right out of the wall.

The traffic was heavy, carriages, cabs, wagons, carts of every description passing by, splashing the water out of the gutters, wheels hissing on the wet road, horses dripping, sodden hides dark. Drivers sat hunched with collars up and hats down in a futile attempt to keep the cold rain from running down their necks, hands clenched on the reins.

The two left wheels of Tara and Abelard’s carriage lurched off the ground as the driver swung them into the narrow gap between a large driverless wagon and a mounted courier. Tara scrambled to the elevated side of the passenger cabin, eyes wide, and shot an angry look at Abelard when he chortled. The airborne wheels returned to the cobblestones with a bone-jarring thud. Tara’s teeth clapped together so hard her jaw ached. “Is our driver insane?” He brought one finger to his lips. “Don’t let him hear you. Cabbies in Alt Coulumb are touchy, with reason. The Guild has zero tolerance for accidents.” “They fire you if you have a wreck?” “It involves fire, yes. Trust me, there’s no safer place on the road in Alt Coulumb than in a cab.” “Especially when there are cabs on the road,” she noted as they cut off a one-horse hatchback, which careened out of control into a delivery wagon.

I’m sorry for taking so long.” Tori straightened her shoulders as if readying herself for battle, then traipsed down the steps to the street. “I had a few last-minute details to see to.” Ben hurried around the back of the wagon to meet her and had opened his mouth to offer assurances that the delay was no problem when Lewis popped his head up. “About time! Sheesh, Ma. You took for-ev-er.” Ben cast a warning glance at the boy. “I’m sure whatever your ma was doing was important.” He turned back to Tori and gave her his most charming grin. “She’s worth waiting on.” Her lips tightened at that, but into a shape that looked more like disapproval than appreciation of a compliment. So much for his charm. “Yes, well . . . I suggest we delay no longer.” Tori lengthened her stride, giving him no chance to assist her into the wagon. She scrambled up the wheel spokes and onto the bench before he could even think about fitting his hands to her waist and hoisting her up. Unfortunate, that. Ben shrugged off his disappointment and moved forward to give his team a final check before climbing into the driver’s seat. Emma handed a large basket up to Tori and wished her farewell while Grace Mallory waved from behind the store railing. As he clucked to his Shires and set the wagon in motion, Ben grinned to himself. One of the best parts of this plan to call on area homesteaders was the sheer number of times they’d be required to enter and exit the wagon. Tori might have escaped him this time, but he’d have a couple dozen more chances to wrap his fingers around her slender waist.

or academies in South Carolina, Tennessee, and Connecticut.3 Literacy was fairly high among the Cherokees. Not many spoke or read English, but over half could read and write using the Cherokee alphabet devised by the Cherokee scholar Sequoya in 1821. The nation had a press that turned out a newspaper, hymnbooks, and pamphlets in Cherokee. They were essentially an agricultural people, living by the plow, the spinning wheel, and the anvil. The inventory of 1825 shows 17,531 cattle, 7,653 horses, 47,732 swine, 752 looms, 2,486 spinning wheels, 72 wagons, 921 plows, 10 sawmills, 31 gristmills, 62 blacksmith shops, 8 cotton machines, and 12 schools.4

Mind is the forerunner of all things. Speak or act with an impure mind, suffering follows as the wagon wheel follows the hoof of the ox. Mind is the forerunner of all things. Speak or act with peaceful mind, happiness follows like a shadow that never leaves.4

The cobblestones are a bad match for the wagon, making it feel like she’s sitting atop her own personal earthquake.

It is sad, in a way, that the exploding auto is going the way of the old red streetcar, the horse-drawn milk wagon, the ice truck and other traditional and practical forms of transportation. A shotgun blast from a clump of bushes is nice in its own way, but for drama there is nothing like instant depreciation of a car with a gangster at the wheel.

As he listened his knew those beautiful notes would hit the classroom windows and fall unheard on the paving below, to be trodden into crisp packets and the sticky stuff from Wagon Wheels, the chocolate chipped from Curly Wurlys, and get blown into the concrete corner drain with that gutted tennis ball that lived there.

When he was 20, Khan’s army attack the Tatar tribe for killing his father. Khan said he’d spare those that were taller than the axle pin of his wagon wheel. Since the pin stood 3ft off the ground, he slayed every member apart from the children.

You see, the ancestral horse died out here—well, in the ‘here’ that is my real-life home, but not in the world of Temilún. When the great empires of the Americas arose in the real world—the Toltec, Aztec, Mayan, Inca, our own Muisca—they had several handicaps the civilizations of the Tigris Valley or the Mediterranean did not have—slower communications, no large wagons or sledges since there were no animals capable of hauling them, less need for broad flat roads, hence less pressure to develop the wheel, and so on.” He began pacing again, but this time with an air of happy energy. “In the real world, the Spanish came to the Americas and discovered them ripe for plucking. Only a few hundred men with guns and horses subjugated two continents. Think of that! So I built America again. But this time the horse did not die out.” He took off his feathered crown and set

I know of a group of assorted ages and races, who are using an old wagon wheel for meditation. It is placed on the ground, appropriately painted in the four significant colors, with ancient symbols designed on the circumference. The person seated at the segment representing serenity tries to live that quality, to be serene in all the varying tests of life, what one mystic has called “the daily startle of the world,” so that the group as a whole can depend upon the serenity of the circle being steadily maintained, safe in the keeping of that person. The one sitting in the seat of truth lives truth in all the facets of personal life, so that at the meeting of the group, and in between meetings, the truth of the circle stays steady and firm. The one representing courage shows courage in the events of daily life, so that the courage of the group is steadily maintained. All these qualities can be called upon by any member of the group in need of them. From time to time the wheel is turned, so that the qualities are represented by different people.

It was empty at this hour of Sunday evening—no family in wagon, no writer, no walkers churchward to speak to him and carefully refrain from looking after him when he had passed—the pale, powder-light, powder-dry dust of August from which the long week's marks of hoof and wheel had been blotted by the strolling and unhurried Sunday shoes, with somewhere beneath them, vanished but not gone, fixed and held in the annealing dust, the narrow, splaytoed prints of his wife's bare feet where on Saturday afternoons she would walk to the commissary to buy their next week's supplies while he took his bath; himself, his own prints, setting the period now, as he strode on, moving almost as fast as a smaller man could have trotted, his body breasting the air her body had vacated, his eyes touching the objects—post and tree and field and house and hill—her eyes had lost.

more… When I think of the Bregdan woman I imagine her as a Wagon wheel. The spokes are all her wonderful characteristics. One is her quest for knowledge which increases her capability to understand and analyze the situations she encounters. Another spoke is her self-confidence to be HERSELF, even if it is not conforming to the acceptance of society.

The cross was not Christ’s defeat but his triumph, his march of victory—like a decorated general on a two-wheeled chariot riding through the city before boisterous crowds, flaunting wagons full of foreign spoils, flying banners painted with triumphant war scenes, and parading his defeated foes in chains.

For the Cimbri the battle turned into a rout. The blinding sun gave way to a huge cloud of dust that blinded them, and they found themselves under relentless attack from multiple sides. Their warriors began to flee but their own mothers and wives would not allow them to escape. Standing behind the front line, “the women, in black garments, stood at the wagons and slew the fugitives—their husbands or brothers or fathers, then strangled their little children and cast them beneath the wheels of the wagons or the feet of the cattle, and then cut their own throats.” The Battle of the Raudian Plain spelled the end of the Cimbri—they left 120,000 dead on the plain and the survivors were enslaved. As is so often the case in Roman history, repeated defeats in battle could be endured as long as the Romans won the war.

Thank God Ahab and Meshach were out of sight. He’d worked for Tarlander more than once and would surely have been recognized. “Was that who I think it was?” she asked Benjamin when he waited for her at a bridge crossing a wide creek. “Yessuh.” Benjamin shook his head. “Dat close.” He turned his horse. “Not far now.” They gathered in a small clearing bordering the creek, where Daniel awaited them. He was already gathering sticks for a fire. Jesselynn reached behind her to help a groggy Thaddeus climb up on the seat. “You been a mighty good boy. I’m right proud of you.” “Hungry?” He reached up and wrapped his arms around her neck. Burrowing into her chest like a little gopher, he repeated with more insistence. “Hungry. Want milk?” Jesselynn sighed. Where would they get milk Other fresh food too, for that matter. Her eyes felt as if they’d been rolling in the Sahara Desert, and her rear felt permanently glued to the hard seat. “I git some.” Benjamin remounted his horse. “You’d best take the mule, then,” Jesselynn said. “Oh.” He dismounted with a nod. “ ’Phelia, you got a jug?” Meshach unhitched the team and removed the harness from both horse and mule, then slipped a bridle with short reins on the mule. “You hurry.” After handing Benjamin a couple of their precious store of coins, Jesselynn climbed over the wagon wheel and, when her feet felt solid ground, leaned against the wheel until her knees no longer felt like buckling. She propped