Would there be folk in Heaven as set on a spot as so many of them were on earth? There were plenty who wouldn’t know how to put on time without their own little village and its feuds. As for those who had really loved a place, they couldn’t do anything but break their hearts. There were folks you could never mix—not even in Heaven; folks from places that fought like biting steggs. You couldn’t just set them alongside in their crowns, and take it for granted things would come out right.... They wouldn’t get far with their singing, anyhow, he thought, because you couldn’t make real music with people who didn’t suit. He had joined a choral society when he was young, but left it because he could only sing with those he liked. If somebody sat beside him who wasn’t a friend, he hated to hear their voices mingle and touch. The other man’s voice was an enemy slaying his own, and instead of song there was murder in his heart. Song was a personal revelation that only a friend should hear, and if you sang with an enemy you gave yourself away. He had had the same trouble at the dances, too, with a concertina played by Darby Gill. The concertina itself was a real joy, because of its big chords and its depth and swing. It gave an actual physical push to the crowd, so that you could see the couples swaying as it swayed, but he never played his best when it was there, because he and the fiddle hated Darby Gill. He hoped he wouldn’t have Darby next to him in Heaven. Anyhow, if he had, he would never touch a string.... “Tide’ll be turning soon,” Bob said, and though Kit had forgotten him long since, he did not start, because the sea is always at the back of the marsh-dweller’s mind. Even the village-folk had known the tides by wind and sky, though some of them never went down to the bay in years. Kit and his son, of course, knew them as they knew their meals. They could have told you, every day, what time the returning water drew itself from the deep....