* * * * * Mome is disposed now, it is not a place now, is an actual substance as it was in the beginning, is become entirely what it always was. It has lost its delusion. No one ever called it now by a name. It is the four-arc’d clock of the seasons ticking its tick-tock around the year, and it is the mid-winter spring song of the joree bird, the Carolina wren, when he tee-teedle tee-teedle tee-deets on a high bare bough on a bright morning in January, spring not being here, not being there, not being anywhere. It is the will to say, the power never being sufficient, the reach toward the last word—less than word, half-word, quarter-word, minimum of a word—that shrinks more inwardly and farthest toward its center when it is supplicated, that cries back, “Come,” or “Here, here I am,” when it is unsought. It is the act of looking when the mirror of the earth looks back into a creature, back into quickened nerves and raw sensitive feelers that run to the ends of a town, gray and white threads, living threads, knotted into a net and contrived to catch and to hold pleasure and pain, chiefly to hold pain. It is the beauty of the thing itself welling up within itself continually in a constant rebirth, a resurrection. At any point it partakes of the whole nature of itself—like an onion. It is nobody’s useless old cat, having been stoned three times to death and left by boys in a tin-can heap at the bottom of a gully in Dee Young’s pasture, arising, one eye hanging by a thread, to cry “meauw” on a woman’s kitchen doorstep and to drink warm milk from a brown saucer.