A few strange years ago I walked on a quicksand, in a fog. Then it never occurred to me that the seeming certainties were a quicksand, the visions of Heaven a fog of fantasy. Am I any more likely to sink or stray, now that I know it? Proposition concluded _pro tem_. As for Hell--_Open up, old rat-hole! I may wish to spit._ "Ben," said Reuben, "do be a good boy and eat your bacon." "Mm," said Ben, and smiled, and ate it. Kate's unnatural silence was like a crying. Reuben made a private note to find out, if possible, what ailed her. The dregs of his coffee were still good for a bit more lingering. You could not--in simple nature you could not listen to all the surrounding voices explaining and re-explaining, accusing, justifying, probing, forever contradicting one another and seldom pausing for an answer. You could heed only a few. Which ones? How to choose? Love will choose some of the few, the nearest and surely the most important (including Kate). (_The most important, why? Query noted, for future consideration._) Caution will select a few that must be heard, for reasons of safety and self-defense. And some will be chosen by native curiosity, which Mr. Welland described last Saturday as one of the rarest of all virtues. Other voices speak outside the region of individual contact, some of them urgent. _Micrographia_; the old voice of Hakluyt if only because Ben loves it; Scripture, if only because the world is so obsessed with its thunderings; many others--even Ovid. Mr. Welland spoke of the dramatist Shakespeare; Uncle John has one volume of him--_note: find and percontate, immed._ These voices are not altogether unlike the near ones--more methodical, because the pen, unlike the voice, need not move in dizzy haste to get everything said before someone interrupts; more methodical and not so much given to hemming and hawing and conversational fluff; but these voices too are engaged in explaining and re-explaining, commanding, blurred sometimes in flurries of contradiction. Sometimes (Michael Wigglesworth for example) they sound downright embarrassed and peevish, when the stubborn universe they speak of is so plainly not as they describe it. Since not all voices may be attended, since some of them lie and many more speak loudly in the absence of knowledge, one must wait, Reuben guessed, for the sudden inner waking, the unsought recognition, the mind's clear declaration: This voice--(_Why did you say to me, "Run, boy! Run!"--why?_)--this voice is speaking not merely out of some other's need to assert, but speaking to _me_, and I understand what it says--some of it.... If we create the present by living it, then right and wrong are man-made. I will accept the verdicts of others in this matter if they seem reasonable to me, and just--not otherwise.