The fox and the grafter

I knew of the trickster fox—for which, or rather whom, I had at some point learned the name Reynard—from Aesop, from Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale, and from La Fontaine’s matchless versified fables, especially “The Crow and the Fox”:

Sayers’s Scissors

In Whose Body?, the first of Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey novels, the hero sees the solution all at once:

       And then it happened—the thing he had been half-unconsciously expecting. It happened suddenly, surely, as unmistakably, as sunrise. He remembered—not one thing, nor another thing, nor a logical succession of things, but everything—the whole thing, perfect, complete, in all its dimensions as it were and instantaneously; as if he stood outside the world and saw it suspended in infinitely dimensional space. He no longer needed to reason about it, or even to think about it. He knew it.

       There is a game in which one is presented with a jumble of letters and is required to make a word out of them, as thus:

C O S S S S R I

       The slow way of solving the problem is to try out all the permutations and combinations in turn, throwing away impossible conjunctions of letters, as:

S S S I R C

or

S C S R S O