text:  On the other hand a teller of tales has always felt the want of some enduring thread--though as some one says in a like emergency it be only _packthread_--on which his tales may be strung--something to fill up the pauses and prevent the utter solution of continuity between tale and tale--something that gives the narrator a reasonable plea for _going on again_ and makes the telling another story an indispensable duty upon his part and the listening to it a corresponding obligation upon ours; and ever since the time when that young lady of unpronounceable and unrememberable name told the One Thousand and One Tales telling a fragment every morning to keep her head upon her shoulders there has been devised many a strange expedient for this purpose