The family dachshund, a fine stout little fellow with soulful, wonderfully expressive eyes who regarded me as his proper master and the other family members as our joint subjects, harbored, as a result, serious misconceptions about the nature of the world, due to experiences such as setting his tennis ball, such as we find on the beach now and then, for their fluorescent glow makes quite a contrast to the seaweed and detritus strewn about down there, that he was chewing onto the carpet, near the burn by the kitchen door, where father’s tongs, which mother had found inexplicably flung onto the ivy-covered hillside when they’d bought the place, along with the andirons, let fall a cinder from the fieldstone fireplace, whose glacial migration downhill over the years no doubt accounted for the inclination if not the decrepitude of the rest of the house, with which he’d meant to light the kitchen stove, only to reverse course after discovering that mother was looking in it, only to see it roll away all by itself.