Ben Cory dwelt in a natural multiplicity of worlds. He could be active in the world of Deerfield's daily occasions: the reasonable labors on his father's farm grant; the school remembered from last year, where Ru's offhand brilliance at the piddling studies was now making him disliked, and Ben no longer there to prevent the occasional bloody nose or comfort him after a pedagogic birching; the not-friendly church; the clumsy kindness of some boys and girls of the village, and the mindless, furtively obscene cruelty of others; nearer to him sometimes than any of these, the quiet land itself in the flowing of the seasons, the smells of summer morning and of the milky breath of cattle, the open fields and marshes, the frame of low hills and the all-surrounding presence of maple and beech and oak and pine, the wilderness. Ben knew the unique world his mother's presence created, where without much discomfort he was on his good behavior. With another sort of good behavior he could enjoy the world of being-with-Father, one often lit with unexpected mirth and kindness. He possessed a sense of the outer world: an important Massachusetts, a half-mythical Canada inhabited hatefully by the Others, a New York not very real, an England thought of as Home--in a perfunctory way because of the ocean that made England, for a Deerfield boy, only slightly nearer than the moon. From his father Ben gained some clear perception of the war, the giants France and England raging over old hates and new advantages under two sick and stubborn sovereigns, Queen Anne of England and the doddering Sun King Louis XIV of France--yet the ocean itself was more actual to Ben than England or the war, for Ben's own father had seen it once on a boyhood visit to Dorchester. He said, if your ear lay close on the pillow at night, the murmuring you heard then was not unlike the moaning of breakers on sand, and why shouldn't a boy (said Joseph Cory) send himself to sleep by listening? The sound was eternal, Joseph Cory said--somewhere, always, ocean was breaking on the sand. North of Deerfield the greater wilderness was a world inviting no one, a forest too old for imagining: green rounded hills secret in distance, swamps, valleys obscure, streams of unknown sources. That belonged to the bear and mountain lion, to the deer with midnight eyes and the comic grandeur of moose; to the rabbit--bouncing bread and butter of the wilderness--and the fox and weasel who followed him; to the down-footed lynx and quiet-sliding rattlesnake. Hunters, trappers and fur-traders knew something of that land, and had for nearly a hundred years.