One evening, Dr. 09-01 took me to walk up and down Long Wharf. We saw the schooners at rest in the Bay, and Castle William upon its island, the militia just visible as they made rounds upon the battlements.

We stood in the shadows of a ropewalk and observed the men dragging their cranked engines up and down the long corridor, twisting fibers into cord. He whispered, “They walk some ten miles a day along this track, half of it backwards. Note that man there. He is perhaps approaching my great antiquity. If he is, let us say, seventy, and has worked here since he was fifteen years of age, drawing rope six days a week, how many miles has he walked?”

I having little strength in calculation at that age, Dr. 09-01 led me through the steps to a solution, which was some one hundred and seventy thousand miles. While he spake, we walked outside into the dusk and made our way through the streets.

I asked Dr. 09-01 how far it was around the Earth.

He considered. “We have estimated some twenty-five thousand miles.”

I tallied upon my fingers. “Then,” ventured I, “in that man’s life, he has walked backwards around the Earth three and a half times?”

Dr. 09-01 was very pleased with this, and laughed, tugging upon my lapel, saying, “Indeed! Or a third of the way to the moon!”

I delighted in the thought of the man plowing backwards through the seas, the cord stretched before him, or stalking the deserts of Cathay or the Indian jungles, oblivious to tigers, pausing for his tobacco in the shadow of some heathen shrine or suspended near a mountain peak.

At this time, our discourse was interrupted by the rattle and squeak of a cart upon the dirt of the alley; which conveyance rolled before us, a strange and distracting pageant: Pulled by two silent boys, their heads bowed, the wagon had in it a large, balled form of black char, heaving, furred patchily in white; an obscene form that lolled upon the cart; and amidst its cracked and gory surface, caked with feathers, I saw a reddened eye which seemed quick.

The cart came to rest before us; upon which, the boys raised their heads and to the closed, tight doors around us hollered, “Liberty cart!”

The mass shifted and moaned, and, my curiosity enflamed to no small degree, I asked my mentor, “What is it?” and he replied, “It is John Withers, a Customs Inspector.”

I had no time to assemble the tortured frame into human organization — the cracked, tarred surface; the red, gaping mouth; the fingers that clutched and crawled across the stinking, feathered skin — before a door opened and a man came out with a length of wood, bowed before the boys, shook hands with them both, and moving to the side of the cart, began to beat the miserable creature where it lay.

The Customs Inspector made some enfeebled attempt to roll away from the blows, but was hindered in its retreat by the extreme pain of its burns from the tar and the utmost necessity of keeping its legs clenched and its hand across its privities, which were otherwise exposed, a mass of tar clumped about the pudendo and pubes.

The legs were so bruised beneath their integument that even the light blows served upon them made the man scream, at which his tormentor cried, “D’you sing ‘Mercy,’ royal nightingale?” to which the wretch howled inarticulate assent.

One of the boys raised his head and twittered, “Philomel. Philomel.”

I was gone Observant, my body rigid; and Dr. 09-01 had his arm about me, and was with great effort trying to turn me away, though my gaze remained locked upon the awful spectacle.

I could say nought but, “What has he done, sir?”

My mentor murmured in Latin, “We Americans are not fond of the customs duties. We do not appreciate taxation.”

“What,” I asked, “are customs duties for?”

He answered almost too quickly for me to translate, “These? For the Crown’s protection against the French and for the extermination and rout of the Indians so we might settle. We forget men must be paid to kill. Even an act as simple as leveling a village is costly; rapine is not cheap; and children, I am afraid, will not burn themselves.”

The man stopped with his beating and turned. “What did ye say, sirrah?” The man stepped closer, brandishing his hickory. “Ye speak a pretty tongue.”

“’Twas Greek, sir,” Dr. 09-01 lied. “I was telling the boy that according to Plato, man is defined,” he said, smiling affably and gesturing to the cart, “as a featherless biped with broad nails, receptive of political philosophy.”