He would hold his breath along a certain block, or take four breaths in pounding down the hill from school, or touch each cement block upon a wall as he went past, and touch each of the end-blocks where the steps went up two times, and if he failed to touch them twice, go back and touch the whole wall over from the start.
 And on Sunday he would always do the second thing: he would never do the first on Sunday. All through the day, from midnight Saturday until midnight Monday morning, he would always do the second thing he thought about and not the first. If he woke up on Sunday morning and swung over to the left side to get out of bed, he would swing back and get out on the right. If he started with the right sock, he would take it off and pull the left one on instead. And if he wanted first to use one tie, he would discard it and put on another.
 And so it went the whole day through on Sunday. In every act and moment of his life that day he would always do the second thing he thought about instead of the first. But then when midnight came again, he would, with the same fanatic superstition, do the first thing that he thought about; and if he failed in any detail of this ritual, he would be as gloomy, restless, and full of uneasy boding doubts as if all the devils of mischance were already out in force against him, and posting on their way to do him harm.
 These spells, chants, incantations, and compulsions grew, interwove, and constantly increased in the complexity and denseness of their web until at times they governed everything he did--not only the way he touched a wall, or held his breath while pounding down a hill from school, or measured out a block in punctual distances of breathing, or spanned the cement blocks of sidewalks in strides of four, but even in the way he went along a street, the side he took, the place he had to stop and look, the place he strode by sternly even when he wanted bitterly to stay and look, the trees out in his uncle's orchard that he climbed until he had to climb a certain tree four times a day and use four movements to get up the trunk.
 And this tyrannic mystery of four would also get into the way he threw a ball, or chanted over Latin when preparing it, or muttered ????????? four times in the Subjunctive of the First Aorist, or ????? in the Indicative Active of the First. And it was also in the way he washed his neck and cars, or sat down at a table, split up kindling (using four strokes of the axe to make a stick), or brought up coal (using four scoops of the shovel to fill the scuttle).
 Then there were also days of stern compulsion when he could look at only a single feature of people's faces. On Monday he would look upon men's noses, on Tuesday he would stare into their teeth, on Wednesday he would peer into their eyes, save Thursday for their hands, and Friday for their feet, and sternly meditate the conformation of their brows on Saturday, saving Sunday always for the second feature that occurred to him--eyes when feet were thought of, teeth for eyes, and foreheads when his fine first rapture had been noses. And he would go about this duty of observing with such a stern, fanatical devotion, peering savagely at people's teeth or hands or brows, that sometimes they looked at him uneasily, resentfully, wondering what he saw amiss in their appearance, or shaking their heads and mutter ing angrily as they passed each other by.
 At night, he said his prayers in rhymes of four--for four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two were somehow the key numbers in his arithmetic of sorcery. He would say his one set prayer in chants of four times four, until all the words and meanings of the prayer (which he had composed himself with four times four in mind) were lost, and all that he would follow would be the rhythm and the number of the chant, muttered so rapidly that the prayer was just a rapid blur- but muttered always sixteen times. And if he failed to do this, or doubted he had got the proper count, then he could not sleep or rest after he got into bed, and would get up instantly and go down upon his knees again, no matter how cold or raw the weather was, no matter how he felt, and would not pause until he did the full count to his satisfaction, with another sixteen thrown in as penalty. It was not piety he felt, it was not thought of God or reverence or religion: it was just superstitious mystery, a belief in the wizard-charm of certain numbers, and the conviction that he had to do it in this way in order to have luck.
 Thus, each night he paid his punctual duty to "their" dark authorities, in order to keep himself in "their" good graces, to assure himself that "they" would not forsake him, that "they" would still be for him, not against him, that "they"--immortal, secret, "they" that will not give us rest!--would keep him, guard him, make his life prevail, frustrate his evil enemies, and guide him on to all the glory, love, and triumph, and to that great door, the huge, hinged, secret wall of life--that immanent and unutterable world of joy which was so near, so strangely, magically, and intolerably near, which he would find at any moment, and for which his life was panting.
 One day a circus came to town, and as the boy stood looking at it there came to him two images which were to haunt all the rest of his childhood, but which were now for the first time seen together with an instant and a magic congruence. And these were the images of the circus and his father's earth.
 He thought he had joined a circus and started on the great tour of the nation with it. It was Spring: the circus had started in New Eng land, and worked westward and then southward as the Summer and Autumn came on. His nominal duties--for in his vision every incident, each face and voice and circumstance, was blazing real as life itself were those of ticket seller. But in this tiny show everyone did several things, so he also posted bills, and bartered with the tradesmen and farmers in new places for fresh food. He became very clever at this work--some old, sharp, buried talent for shrewd trading that had come to him from his mountain blood now aided him. He could get the finest, freshest meats and vegetables at the lowest prices. The circus people were tough and hard, they always had a fierce and ravenous hun ger, they would not accept bad food and cooking, they fed stupen dously, and they always had the best of everything.
 Usually the circus would arrive at a new town very early in the morning, before daybreak.