It was the only thing in his life for which he felt guilt.

The land over which he sped was the land he had created and lived in: his valley.

On a shelf in the office behind the counter was a small radio dialed permanently on a station which broadcast only vulgar commercials and cheap popular music.

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.

The only thing which would have attracted attention was that two wore the uniform of prison guards, three the striped suits of convicts.

For everyone involved knew that the whole valley was a powder keg, and Mitchell Barton the fuse which could send it into explosive violence.

There a dozen giant monitors played their seventy-five-foot jets of water against the huge seam of tertiary gravel which was the mountainside.

When they reached their neighbor's house, Pamela said a few polite words to Grace and kissed Melissa lightly on the forehead, the impulse prompted by a stray thought -- of the type to which she was frequently subject these days -- that they might never see one another again.

But she was caught in it, and she faced the terrible possibility that, if it were a dream, it was one from which she might never awaken.

The slight flutter that had disturbed the motion of her heart when she entered the forest was gone now, and even the dim groves of trees through which she occasionally passed did not reawaken her fear.

The herd was watered and then thrown onto a broad grass flat which was to be the first night's bedground.

There was no lock on the door, only an iron hook which he unfastened.

Jess's coarse features twisted in a surprised grin which was smashed out of shape by Curt's fist.

Stevens was grunting over the last empty pocket when Russ abruptly rose and lunged toward Carmer's hat, which had tumbled half-a-dozen feet away when he first fell.

He had no idea which was up and which was down.

I was again in motion and at a speed which belied the truck's similarity to Senor X's Ford turtle.

But it was only Johnson reaching around the wire chicken fencing, which half covered the truck cab's glassless rear window.

The car was just about to us, its driver's fat, solemn face intent on the road ahead, on business, on a family in Sante Fe -- on anything but an old pick-up truck in which two human beings desperately needed rescue.

There had been a good second or two during which my muffler had been blowing out, and now I was certain I'd seen her somewhere before.

There was something about the contour of her face, her smile that was like New Orleans sunshine, the way she held her head, the way she walked -- there was scarcely anything she did which did not fascinate me.

Mrs. Roebuck very kindly let me drive through Sante Fe to a road which would, she said, lead us to Taos and then Raton and `` eventshahleh '' out of New Mexico.

Others are confined to vast reservations, and not only does the Australian government justifiably not wish them to be viewed as exhibits in a zoo, but on their reservations they are extremely fugitive, shunning camps, coming together only for corroborees at which their strange culture comes to its highest pitch -- which is very low indeed.

More potent a charm to bring back that time of life than this record of a few pictures and a few remembered facts would be a catalogue of the minutiae which are of the very stuff of the mind, intrinsic, because they were known in the beginning not by the eye alone but by the hand that held them.

When I try to work out my reasons for feeling that this passage is of critical significance, I come up with the following ideas, which I shall express very briefly here and revert to in a later essay.

Both I and my feelings come up out of a chain of events that fan out into the past into sources that are ultimately very unlike the entity which I now am.

The very nature of a choice so grounded in distinction and fact leads to the valid convictions which become force of will in the manifest leader.

and in early 1939, a `` Fallen Figure '' of very ominous character, which concluded his abstract phase.

The problem is rather to find out what is actually happening, and this is especially difficult for the reason that `` we are busily being defended from a knowledge of the present, sometimes by the very agencies -- our educational system, our mass media, our statesmen -- on which we have had to rely most heavily for understanding of ourselves ''.

Second, our military missile program, going forward so successfully, does not suffer from our present lack of very large rocket engines, which are necessary in distant space exploration.

he often uses very odd rhythms, which makes it difficult, and challenging, for the lyric writer ''.

In one of the very few letters in which he ever complained of Meynell, Thompson told Patmore of his distress at having had to leave London before this new friendship had developed further: ``

That was a very absurd and annoying situation in which I was placed by W. M.'s curious methods of handling me.

There is every reason to recognize that in the very last years of his life, as we shall see, Thompson did take the drug in carefully rationed doses to ease the pains of his illness, but the exact date at which this began has never been determined.

Upon second thought we were forced to realize that we have very few reliable historical benchmarks against which we might compare the present situation, and that conclusions that present-day students are `` more '' or `` less '' religious could not be defended on the basis of our data.

`` Tact '', by its very derivation, implies that its possessor keeps in touch with other people, but the author of Clericis Laicos and Unam Sanctam, the wielder of the two swords, the papal sun of which the imperial moon was but a dim reflection, the peer of Caesar and vice-regent of Christ, was so high above other human beings that he had forgotten what they were like.

Mankind, as a result, attains previously undreamed of levels of civilization and culture, a golden age which the Overlords, a very evident symbol of science, have helped produce by introducing reason and the scientific method into human activities.

And they have done this on a very large scale, with a veritable flood of novels and stories which are either dystopias or narratives of adventure with dystopian elements.

This magnificent but greatly underestimated book, which bodies forth the very form and pressure of its time as no other comparable creation, has suffered severely from having been written about an historical event -- the Spanish Civil War -- that is still capable of fanning the smoldering fires of old political feuds.

Hansen will be getting a late spring training start, which might very well set him back.

For some compulsive reason which would have fascinated Dr. Freud, Communists of all shapes and sizes almost invariably impute to others the very motives which they harbor themselves.

For something, clearly, has gone very, very seriously wrong in Soviet-Chinese relations, which were never easy, and have now deteriorated.

The fact that China ( which is obsessed by Formosa -- to Khrushchev a very small matter ) should be supported by North Korea and North Vietnam is highly indicative.