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and read a book in the boy’s attic room. No one thought any longer about the snowball lying in the saucer like an extinguished crystal ball. The family had long since ceased advancing possible theories to one another about the enduring ice. In August the boy’s father came home – “sick to death” of the woman he had run away with in the fall of the previous year. The boy now sat waiting for his father to come upstairs to say whatever he would say to him, turning his hat in his hands the way he did when he was uneasy in his mind. The man knocked once at his son’s door, then entered. Before he could open his mouth to remark on the freezing room (in the dog days, look – frost on the windowpanes!), he was struck dead. It took only minutes for the ice to melt.

    Believing his time had come, he avenged himself on all those who had shown him contempt, then took his own life. But he had been mistaken in this belief just as he had mistaken the intentions towards him of those he murdered, which were always friendly, even affectionate.

    The flowering peach tree was not the first place he had thought to hang himself. But it was the most picturesque. That it should be so was important for his own pleasure, when his eyes closed for the last time on earth and for the shock he hoped the incongruity would cause his wife when she found his body. In this way her pain would be increased – a thing that made him glad as he stood on the ladder and prepared to jump.

    He said that a filament, very nearly invisible, connected all people, one to the other. Should it be broken – by death, for example – all feel it – feel death, their own and suffer it, an agony, if only in nightmare. Remembering the woman who, years before, had made him suffer, he killed himself, almost with pleasure.

    In the yard outside the man’s house, a swamp maple grew “overnight,” at least this is the impression those who lived in the neighborhood had. (There were some others, of course, who claimed it had always been there – but that could not be. It would have been noticed before then, certainly.) A little later – more quickly than anyone could have believed possible – a vine grew up the side of the tree, climbed out over the lowest branch and now hung down, lolling – its thick stem twisted into a kind of loop. The milkman was the first to see him – his body hanging from the tree, the vine around his neck. None knew his crime.

    He was powerless – he said – to resist the impulse to write once it had seized him. My muse – he said, his voice made strange by what emotion his friends could not guess. Often, when he had shut himself up in his room to write, they heard him weeping. He is with his muse – they told each other, embarrassed. Had they known it was a suicide note he had been helplessly composing, they might have saved him. But perhaps not – so inexorable was his muse, so obedient his hand.

    The end of the world came; and to save his family from the horror which would befall those who must await their own end from storm or famine, fire or pestilence, he poisoned them all. As he was about to hang himself, an angel appeared and said to him that he had dreamed it – dreamt that the end of the world was come. He stared in horror at his wife and children lying dead in the room with him as the angel, with an inscrutable look, withdrew – its wings stiff with insolence.

    In small ways, too, the end of the world came. For example, a wooden crate was caught in the waves as they struggled close to the beach to return to the open sea. A man from the town on the other side of the dunes took off his shoes and went into the water to bring it ashore, hoping to find inside whiskey or something else of value he might sell in town. While he wrestled with it, a wave knocked him down and his head hit a corner of the crate so that the blood flowed. All the same he