"Why can't I remember it?" "Oh, you was--I don't know. Hush--that's over...." Ben could find no light at all beyond the windows. Enough light filtered in from the hallway where a rushlight burned to show him Reuben's face gone vague and absent. As time crawled on, Ben wondered how anyone could spend an hour at evening prayers. Adna Pownal Cory would have called it excess of zeal. His memory of his grandmother ought not to be so dim, he thought. When he was four, his mother had been expecting another child--a girl who lived only a week, as it happened--and Madam Cory offered to take him for a month or so; Adna Cory would not let two-year-old Reuben out of her care, for he was sickly, but she let Ben go. Madam Cory was then forty-nine, to Ben timelessly ancient. Ben could recall little except a struggle to say a Psalm right for her. Gray skirt, stiff white bodice, plain cap--and Ben _could_ not get in all those new words of the Psalm. Grandmother's hand was dry and cool. "Dost thou not _wish_ to be saved, Benjamin?..." After Grandfather Cory died in 1688, Grandmother's younger sister and brother-in-law moved in with her--Patience and Recovered Herrin. The Herrins were blessed with six surviving children, whom they must have distributed somehow around the house. Ben could dredge up no infantile memory of them but a blur of faces sharing nothing, voices tediously speaking not for him. He knew that Patience had died in '97, and Recovered had gathered up his brood, married again and moved away. Ben recovered no memory of the Pownals breezing in at Springfield to look at him, though they must have done so. Ben's aunt Mercy Pownal visited Deerfield in 1701, wearing a red silk hood, reckless short-sleeved bodice and scarlet cheyney jacket that shocked Mr. Williams and others to the bone, especially in view of a rumor that the woman could read Greek and Latin, had been to London (or Philadelphia?--some foreign place anyway) and, worst of all, was twenty-nine and yet unmarried. Ben remembered his mother trying to speak a formal welcome and crying instead. Then the two clung to each other in the doorway, the tall woman leaning her cheek against Mother's head, saying: "Nay, it's good, Adna, good--I wish I was in thy little shoes." Moments later Ben's mother was showing her over the small house, still sniffling, also chuckling like a skylark.