And you wanted no part of me when I had so much to give.

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.

In the brief moment I had to talk to them before I took my post on the ring of defenses, I indicated I was sickened by the methods men employed to live and trade on the river.

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

At first I thought he had missed.

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

Later I would remember what this pompous little man had told me about the worth of a ticket.

One afternoon, upon receiving permission and the necessary instructions from the clerk, I had visited the toilet adjoining the hall.

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 could observe the two fans down at the end, but their size in themselves meant nothing to me as long as I had no measure of comparison.

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.

And I had hardly finished my business in the toilet on the aforementioned occasion when the lights in that place, like the hall lights controlled from the switch in the office, flicked off and on impatiently.

I had signed it off on the forms.

Although I had been inside it I had not yet seen it functioning.

I knew that three or four of them were almost always present in the hall, but what they were doing, and exactly where, I could not tell.

I had always, I said, hankered after working hard with my hands.

Ramey smiled but he thought to himself, I always see me too.

At a party an English intellectual -- so-called -- asked me why I write always about distress.

But all this, I am well aware, is the bel canto of love, and although I have always liked to think that it was to the bel canto and to that alone that I listened, I know well enough that it was not.

The daughter, Lilly, was a very good friend of mine and I always had hopes that someday she and Meltzer would find each other.

I would have liked the town and the busyness of its people but I always followed Lilly into the peace of the silent and unstaring road.

If it proclaims that the best is yet to be, it always arouses, at least in the young, either a suspicious question or perhaps the exclamation of the Negro youth who saw on a tombstone the inscription, `` I am not dead but sleeping ''.

But I will also remind them that I have always been inclined to skepticism, to a kind of Laodicean lack of commitment so far as public affairs are concerned ; ;

At about the age of twelve I became a Spencerian liberal, and I have always considered myself a liberal of some kind even though the definition has changed repeatedly since Spencer became a reactionary.

The concern they felt for me was such as I shall never forget and for which I will always be grateful.

( He always smiles -- at least at visitors, I gather.

`` I imagine you're always battling in school ''.

`` I'm dressed as I always am '', Rousseau said.

What I did know was that Precious was always around.

My God, how long is he going to wait, I thought.

`` I thought I told you to stay home ''.

The way his red rubber lips were stretched across his pearly little teeth I thought he was only having a little joke, but, no, he wanted me to bend down from the roar of wind so he could roar something into my ear.

You thought I was a Mexican, didn't you, buddy ''??

Suddenly and not a second too soon I thought of the coins in my pocket.

Maybe Lou was only unconscious, but right then I thought he must be dead.

I thought I saw a faint surge of color rise to her neck and quickly suffuse her cheeks.

At first, I thought he was out of his head, talking wildly like this.

`` When I came up, damnit, I thought I was going down.

But when it happens to you like that, I tell you, and you're a hundred feet from where you thought you were -- well, it makes you think.

But I would never have thought of it myself ''.

That, I thought, is at least one thing I can find out when we meet.

I used his polarity to illustrate what I thought had happened to us in that form of liberalism we call Progressivism.

`` I hated the war '', he said, `` but thought I ought to go because I was, perhaps, one of those who hadn't done enough to prevent it ''.

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.