She said, `` I guess the Lord looks out for fools, drunkards, and innocents ''.

Still, I was disgusted with myself for agreeing with Montero's methods.

I saw the clergyman kneel for a moment by the twitching body of the man he had shot, then run back to his position.

Now under me I could see him for what he really was, a boy dressed up in streaks of paint.

He pointed out the switch to me and for a moment I foolishly believed that he would let deed follow words.

Now, here was something of obvious importance to me, yet when I reached for the tickets he snatched them away from my hand.

Having nothing else to do except wait for my forms to be processed, I gave myself over to speculations concerning the hall itself.

For although I had crossed a corner of the hall on my way to the toilet I still could not tell for sure how far to the rear the darkness extended.

I had for some time been hoping, in vain, for one of the dim figures to pass between the fan vents and myself.

It was, I felt, possible that they were men who, having received no tickets for that day, had remained in the hall, to sleep perhaps, in the corners farthest removed from the counter with its overhead light.

I was constantly searching for clues around the neighborhood of the hall.

I returned to the hall, despite my dislike for the clerk.

When I went for my interview with the director I saw why.

No one was behind it, but in the rear wall of the office I noticed, for the first time, a door which had been left partially open.

Was I sure, he asked, that I knew what I was applying for??

Though I doubted that he would understand me, I told the director my motives for applying.

He said in a studied voice, `` I didn't do it for you.

I did it for the valley.

I was just doing my job, just following orders, and for that he's going to kill me.

As I dug in behind one of the bales we were using as protection, I grudgingly found myself agreeing with Oso's logic, especially when I imagined what would have happened to Missy if Old Knife's large party of screeching warriors had overrun our company.

Next to him was a young boy I was sure had sat near me at one of the trading sessions.

When one of the men in the hall behind us spat on the floor and scraped his boot over the gob of spittle I noticed how the clerk winced.

In the mornings, I was informed, fluorescent tubes, similar to the one above the counter, illuminated the entire hall.

By counting the number of stalls and urinals I attempted to form a loose estimate of how many men the hall would hold at one time.

Don't like to bother no one unless we have to, which I figger we do, in your case.

But there's one thing I never seen or heard of, one thing I just don't think there is, and that's a sportin' way o' killin' a man ''!!

Adios '', I said, exhausting my Spanish vocabulary on my host and exchanging one of a scarcely-tapped store of smiles with my host's daughters.

I seized the rack and made a western-style flying-mount just in time, one of my knees mercifully landing on my duffel bag -- and merely wrecking my camera, I was to discover later -- my other knee landing on the slivery truck floor boards and -- but this is no medical report.

Seeming much relieved, she smiled one of those worth-waiting-for smiles, and I smiled all the way into the bedroom.

I worked for my Uncle ( an Uncle by marriage so you will not think this has a mild undercurrent of incest ) who ran one of those antique shops in New Orleans' Vieux Carre, the old French Quarter.

I dismissed these feelings as wishful thinking but I could not get it out of my head that we had a strong physical attraction for one another and we both feared to dwell on it because of our relationship.

I don't even remember who wrote it but it was one of those 15th or 16th century poets.

I felt that he looked at me coldly and appraisingly and seemed to be uncertain what his attitude towards me should be, but he did not say one word which might indicate that he had been told of advances to his wife.

Of course, males play a role there, but believe me when I say you wouldn't enjoy yourself one bit on Eromonga.

I clapped the big man with the bleached hair on his shoulder and said heartily, hoping it would make an impression on the women: `` This one is the maku Frayne.

This light did not penetrate very far back into the hall, and my eyes were hindered rather than aided by the dim daylight entering through the fan vents when I tried to pick out whatever might be lying, or squatting, on the floor below.

I would have foregone my romantic chances rather than leave a friend sweltering and dusty and -- Well, at least I wouldn't have shouted back a taunt.

Since attack serves to stimulate interest in broadcasts, I added to my opening statement a sentence in which I claimed that German youth seemed to lack the enthusiasm which is a necessary ingredient of anger, and might be classified as uninterested and bored rather than angry.

I think it is rather foolhardy to trust to luck ''.

I have chosen to use the word `` mimesis '' in its Christian rather than its classic implications and to discover in the concrete forms of both art and myth powers of theological expression which, as in the Christian mind, are the direct consequence of involvement in historical experience, which are not reserved, as in the Greek mind, only to moments of theoretical reflection.

It is to say rather, I believe, that he has brought to bear on the history, the traditions, and the lore of his region a critical, skeptical mind -- the same mind which has made of him an inveterate experimenter in literary form and technique.

The fact that he has cast over those materials the light of a skeptical mind does not make him any the less Southern, I rather think, for the South has been no more solid than other regions except in the political and related areas where patronage and force and intimidation and fear may produce a surface uniformity.

It would be profitable, I believe, to read these realistic humorists alongside Faulkner's works, the thought being not that he necessarily read them and owed anything to them directly, but rather that they dealt a hundred years ago with a class of people and a type of life which have continued down to our time, to Faulkner's time.

However, I confess my hope that I will be innocent again, not with a pristine, accidental innocence, but rather with an innocence achieved by the slow cutting away of the flesh to reach the bone.

To you, for instance, the word innocence, in this connotation, probably retained its Biblical, or should I say technical sense, and therefore I suppose I must make myself quite clear by saying that I lost -- or rather handed over -- what you would have considered to be my innocence two weeks before I was legally entitled, and in fact by oath required, to hand it over along with what other goods and bads I had.

`` There was nothing else I could do '', the maid answered, satisfied with a rather vague explanation.

I use this term to mean three things: a search for the human significance of an event or state of affairs, a tendency to look at wholes rather than parts, and a tendency to respond to these events and wholes with feeling.

When I first came across Samuel Johnson's pronouncement, `` the remedy for the ills of life is palliative rather than radical '', it seemed to me to sum up the profoundest of political and social truths.

Why did I choose to fill these pages in this particular issue with this mixture of rather tenuous reflections and autobiography??

I would, however, like to suggest that, wrong though I may be, the tendency to see dilemmas rather than solutions is one of which I have been a victim ever since I can remember, and therefore not merely a senile phenomenon.