Early in ‘The Ring of Time’ (1956), E. B. White observes a horse guided by its trainer around a circus ring, and notes that ‘the two of them, horse and woman, seemed caught up in one of those desultory treadmills of afternoon from which there is no apparent escape’. A pun on desultory seems not to have been noticed. A desultory, in Latin, is a horse ridden by a desultor. A desultor is a horse leaper, one who leaps from horse to horse, and indeed, in the next paragraph a horse leaper enters: ‘a girl of sixteen or seventeen … stepped to the ring … and swung herself aboard’ (142)....