And kids like us spent long summer afternoons happily playing tapeball, our version of the national pastime, in the streets of our working-class neighborhood.

They belonged to a nation dedicated to the figurative arts, and they wrote for a public familiar with painted form.

Seated in my barber's chair in the ingle-nook, with a book and a cup of coffee on the table in front of me, I would hear coming down the chimney, as though the village was situated on an island in the sky, a succession of slow, somnolent sounds: …

He had used the star Sirius as his standard, so he decided to call the distance to Sirius, whatever it might turn out to be in miles or kilmetres, one 'siriometer'. Herschel calculated that the grindstone measured 1,000 siriometers across and was 100 siriometers thick.