Cranks of ev'ry Radius

[Seymour Landnau]

Once the lads get cracking on the groundwork of their arrival, creating
shapes, borders, conceptual prisons from ever thinning air, problems
intractable, arcs, tangents, meridians 'pon a phantasm point, they finish,
roughly, in sometime over a year.  And what do the Lads do then, what
curiosity gains their angular attention, but oh look, it's a local massacre
of 26 Indians, over at Lancaster Town.

Upon the Tavern Sign of this unholy town is a downside up pointed star,
symbolik of...the D----l's horns!  And the Lads are none too pleased with
this particular tourist destination.  Mason, more depressed than usual now,
wants to vacate the entire country, while Dixon declares this place a few
orders worse than even the Dutch in Capetown (ah, those were the days,
those were the pages, weren't they!) and contemplates falling on his knees
right there.  Th'Lads wonder aloud who it is they are working for,
presumably meaning the Devil himself.

Then we're off to another, ever enchanting, fireside interlude with the
ever colorful Cherrycoke clan.  'Tis chapter right subsequent to the
three.four, barely precipitating the thirtysixth, begins with a quote from
one of Wicks' lesser known books, *Christ and Humor*, I mean, *Christ and
History.*  The gist, the kernel, the crux, the glad tidings of the quote
being that history is the finding of our common destiny among our ever
chaotic tangents and arcs...

Uncle Ive thinks this is nonsense.  Facts is facts.  Yet Coke prefers
Manchausen to Gibbon and loves that Herodotus refused to say Thoth.
 (Which, by the way, you say "Tot" [line over the oh] blowing quick air out
with the push-release of the tongue off the top of mouth just behind the
front teeth, then a brisk audible clasping of the teeth, lips closed, or
closing anyway.  Same with Seth.)  Coke believes that facts are only tools
used by the powerful, and it is "the Fabulist's Art" what creates true
history.  Uncle Ives retorts by way of pointing out that Novels are the
Devil's work.

Adorable Tenebrae then wants to know, one, if Shakespeare's "histories" are
factual or not, and second whether or not Hamlet existed.  Quiet on the
first half, Ethelmer pipes in that the factual Hamlet married an English
princess then later Hermuthruda, Queen of Scots.

Ever musikal and well-traveled Euphrenia notices that Hamlet's two wives is
nothing next to the number of the Barbary Pirates she used to know.  Wicks
sips peach brandy and is reminded when he next bumped into the Lads, the
winter of '65-64...
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