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name, the cow was only called the cow, and he had a hen and her name was Mother Hen and she had twelve chicks, eleven of them were ordinary, golden chicks, but the twelfth one was bigger than the others and had black feathers and he had a name, it was Percy; Percy caused his mother a great deal of worry, for he always would provoke the anger of Miss Tibbs and Mr. Dan by attempting to eat their food; but his mother’s greatest worry came when she saw him try to fly up to sit on the uppermost bar of the farm’s fence; he tried and tried and failed and then one day succeeded but only for a moment and then he fell down and broke one of his wings and one of his legs; it was Mr. Joe who said, ‘Percy the chick had a fall.’ I liked that sentence then and I like that sentence now but then I had no way of making any sense of it, I could only keep it in my mind’s eye, where it rested and grew in the embryo that would become my imagination; a good three and a half years later, I met Percy again but in another form; as a punishment for misbehaving in class, I was made to copy Books One and Two of Paradise Lost by John Milton and I fell in love with Lucifer, especially as he was portrayed in the illustration, standing victoriously on one foot on a charred globe, the other foot aloft, his arms flung out in that way of the victor, brandishing a sword in one of them, his head of hair thick and alive for his hair was all snakes poised to strike; I then remembered Percy and I do now know Percy.”

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    To see then Mr. Sweet, a very small boy in short pants and short-sleeved shirt bounding across the green grass of a lawn, selling, in a boyish way, water flavored with lemon juice and sugar to friends of his parents, sitting in a chair and listening to jazz, eating peaches that had been poached in pineapple juice, speaking authoritatively of being and not being, traversing the island that was Manhattan, and at that time not being able to see at all the house in which Shirley Jackson lived, the house in which he would live with the fugues trapped in his head, murdering the young Heracles over and over again and that boy coming alive again and again; to see Mr. Sweet, the short pants and short-sleeved shirt being replaced by the brown corduroy suit that Mrs. Sweet had purchased at the Brooks Brothers outlet in Manchester; not being able to see his then now; to see Mr. Sweet then before he was Mr. Sweet, innocent of the small short-haired mammal that thrived in the Mesozoic era; Mr. Sweet who was often found lying down on a couch in an old house that had once been occupied by a woman who wrote short stories and brought up her children and whose husband had betrayed her and had behaved as if he were nothing more than a louse to her, so recorded in a biography of her life.
    Closing his eyes then, a long time ago now, there is Mr. Sweet, sitting at that ancient instrument, the harp, wrestling with that large triangle and holding it steady against his small, pretend manly breast; wrestling with a diminishing pitch here, a lengthening string there; gut in the middle, wire below; the flats and sharps, the major and minor keys, harmonic systems, double melodies, polyphony, monodists, melismata in the plainsong, the contrapuntal forms, allegro, concertos, not yet the nocturne—not now that but the ballad—oh yes, oh yes, all that flooded over Mr. Sweet as he sat before his ancient instrument, the harp, worshipping and worshipping, its holiness causing him to grow weak, he was so young, not yet Mr. Sweet and yet he was always Mr. Sweet as even he himself could see now then.
    Oh, but this is the voice of the monodist, and with the ancient instrument Mr. Sweet is on a stage all alone, the podium has even been moved to the side, the auditorium is full of chairs but no audience, and this pleases the young Mr. Sweet, young and full-size he is then, not old and the size of a mole as he is now, and he plays the ancient instrument with joy and love and