This, apparently, was the truth. He couldn't. He stopped in at Jackson's Book Store (formerly B. F. Jones's) and bought paper and pencils: Then, in a thrill of fresh importance, he bought penholders, large desk blotters, a flannel pen-wiper with a bronze dog seated in the centre, a cut-glass inkstand, a ruler, half a dozen pads of a better paper, a partly abridged dictionary, Roget's _Thesaurus_, (for years he had casually wondered what a Thesaurus was), a round glass paperweight with a gay butterfly imprisoned within, four boxes of wire clips, assorted sizes, and, because he saw it, Crabb's _Synonyms_. Then he saw an old copy of _The Thousand and One Nights_ and bought that. It seemed to him that he ought to be equipped for his work. Before he went out he asked the prices of the better makes of typewriters. And for the first time in two years, he uttered the magic but too often fatal words:-- 'Just charge it, if you don't mind.' 7 He was back at the rooms by nine-fifteen. Before the university clock boomed out the hour of noon, he had written that elusive, extraordinary little classic, _A Kerbstone Barmecide_, and had jotted down suggestive notes for the story that was later to be known as _The Printer and the Pearls_. By this time all thoughts of civic reform had faded out. Charlie Waterhouse, now that _The Caliph of Simpson Street_ was done and, in a surface sense, forgotten, no longer appeared to him as a crook who should be ousted from the local political triumvirate and from town office; he was but a bit of ore in the rich lode of human material with which Henry's fancy was playing. The important fact about the new Waterhouse store-and-office building in South Sunbury, was not that there was reason to believe Charlie had built it with town money but that he had put a medallion bas-relief of himself in terra cotta in the front wall. Charlie figured, though, unquestionably, in _Sinbad the Treasurer_. At noon, deciding that he would stroll out after a little and eat a bite, Henry stretched out on the lounge. Here he dozed, very lightly for an hour or two. Humphrey stole in, found him tossing there, fully dressed, mumbling in his sleep, and stole out. But early in the afternoon Henry leaped up. His brain, or his emotions, or whatever the source of his ideas, was a glowing, boiling, seething crater of tantalising, obscurely associated concepts and scraps of characterisation and queerly vivid, half-glimpsed dramatic moments, situations, contrasts. They amounted to a force that dragged him on. The thought that some bit might escape before he could catch it and get it written down kept his pulse racing. At about half-past four he finished that curious fantasy, _Roc's Eggs, Strictly Fresh_.