Some of the objects were commonplace enough; others were fantastic. The scavenging-obsession of the wishing-bone allowed him to omit nothing that he could rake up out of a thousand obscure half-memories. The thumbnail-parings of a nameless old tramp sitting by a milestone on the Bristol road⁠ ⁠… the amber-coloured drop of rheum in the eye of a one-eyed doorkeeper of a house of ill-fame in Soho⁠ ⁠… the torn-off corner of a butcher’s advertisement lying in a gutter outside St. Paul’s⁠ ⁠… the left arm of a china doll thrown on an ashcan under the west door of Ely Cathedral⁠ ⁠… the yellow excrement of a dog, shaped like a dolphin, adhering to the north wall of the Brighton Aquarium⁠ ⁠… the white spittle of a drunken cabman outside the station at Charing Cross⁠ ⁠… the hair-clippings from an unknown head, wrapped in a French comic paper and dropped in the public urinal at Eastbourne⁠ ⁠… such things, and others like them, all parts and parcels of what humanity sets itself to forget , did Wolf and the wishing-bone redeem from the limbo of obliterated memory and gather in a heap on the kitchen-table of Number Thirty-Seven Preston Lane!