"[He] took me into his library and showed me his books, of which he had a complete set." - Ring Lardner

Muckraking journalist James F. Finley, known for his scathing exposes on social ills, has revealed that the quiet neighbor who had been living in the ornate Victorian house next door to him for years was in fact a bonafide wordsmith. Recently, Finley took a crisp autumn afternoon to get to know the man, whose name is Henry Waddington, a man of humble demeanor and thoughtful intent.

As Finley stepped into Waddington's living room, he was struck by the large, floor-to-ceiling bookcases that lined the walls, their shelves crowded with titles of all shapes and sizes, their leather bindings worn from years of handling. Waddington, noticing Finley's interest, took him into his library and showed him his books, of which he had a complete set, including works by Dickens, Austen, and the great American novelists. Finley, himself a voracious reader, was deeply impressed by the scope of Waddington's collection, which spanned centuries and continents.

Over a glass of fine scotch, Waddington regaled Finley with tales of his literary heroes, of how he had devoured the works of Melville and Hemingway in his youth, and how he still returned to them again and again for inspiration. Finley, sensing that Waddington was a kindred spirit, asked him about his own writing, and was rewarded with the wit and insight of a seasoned wordsmith. Waddington spoke of the art of crafting a sentence, of the precise balance between syntax and semantics that could transport the reader to another world.

Finley listened, transfixed, as Waddington spun tales of his peripatetic travels, of the people he had met and the stories he had heard along the way. He told of Omaha's spare and rural landscape, of the glimpse he had caught of the glittering ice of the Sierras, and the tiny laboratory of a pocket-sized Sudanese village. Finley's mind, once focused solely on unmasking corrupt business deals, began to consider the elusive shape of a larger culture, the sectioning that streams into unified lines and combustible simultaneity.

When the evening drew to a close, Finley knew he had encountered a difficult precept that he had somehow not realized – the printed legend restoring a compartment in its walls for contents past winding construction, out comforting encounters rich-running familiar face heard gray sounds.