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“How did you do that?”

And she said: “Magic”

Thomas put his arms around her neck He called her Mother and not Gwendolyn, because these were Nors to do And when his patchwork scrap-yarn wombat, ore a little puff-yarn cocoa-barrel round her neck like a Saint Bernard, did not answer back when he asked her to tell hi was Biteable and Good, he did not tear her head off in his anguish, though he wanted to, very badly Instead, he na her in front of hi and warm and alive, while she fired passionfruits and horseshoes and whiskey bottles out of her uilty start—Norood and drea else

Every day, even though it was Not Normal, and he knew it, Thomas Rood stood under the chandelier and whispered:

“Will-o’-the-wisp! If you coive you a kiss!” And after a moment, he added: “Please, please talk to me”

But the chandelier did not want a kiss, and years went by, and the heart of Thomas Rood fired itself at all the quiet, still objects of our world, begging the with them to come alive

CHAPTER V

THE ADVENTURES OF INSPECTOR BALLOON

In Which Thohts the Battle of Hastings Over Again

In the lower left-hand corner of his clothes dresser Thoes had no lines The clothes dresser was called Bruno The notebook was called Inspector Balloon for the six bright balloons and a big white lass painted on it

Tho he could put his hands on After all, he reasoned, nothing could really be real unless it had a na at all and had to be summoned to dinner with cries of “Nobody in Particular!” He preferred strange-sounding and thorny names out of his books and his head, and secretly resented every day being called so as workaday as Thomas He called their cantankerous oven Hephaestus, the laundry tub and washboard Beatrice and Benedick, the chandelier he dubb

ed Citrine, the standing radio Scheherazade His bed was clearly an Aht He insisted upon calling their neighbors’ cats Henrys I through VIII, though they had their own names to which they had become quite accustomed Thoht proud Kings, and he would not be moved on the subject Na You couldn’t expect anything to talk to you if you didn’t call it by name

When he saw the notebook in a shop , Thonized it like he would recognize his own hand He so when he saw certain objects—that they were already his, only tely separated fro He knew instantly what it was for, what it wanted to be when it grew up—a Real Live Book Owned by a Boy Gwendolyn, thrilled that he wanted soht him an impressively businesslike silver-capped pen that spat blue ink to go along with it (called Mr Indigo) The pen, unlike the book, was not cosmically his, but it would do Thomas had rushed into his bedroo himself onto Amalthea, and opened Inspector Balloon to the first beautiful blank page, new and perfect as the head of creao’s ink carved thick purpley-blue rivers into the paper, dividing it into a fertile and atered countryside, every inch of white fed by those deep, generous streams

Tho All trolls are skilled in the Dark Arts of Pen to the heroics of Tufa, one of the three Pri the es, hunted doild Alphabet and est-lived creatures in all the grand universe The Troll Alphabet lives still in the Heliotrope Hills, gru, in the small ways an Alphabet can, the folk that ta

Thon his name in such a fashion as to make John Hancock weep