And Mr. Williams, melodious: "Goody Cory, I have prayed that this affliction might bring you and your good husband to a better understanding of the Christian's necessities. Oh, how advantageous gracious supplications are! God accounts forgetting his mercies a forgetting himself--no time more fit for praise than a time of trial. Why, can't you see this visitation must be God's means of bringing you and Goodman Cory and----" "There was _hominy_ in it!" An ecclesiastical sigh followed that wail, and the rapid, harsher sighs of Reuben fighting to live. But what else had his father said? Was it before they went outdoors?--in Ben's memory they were already in the yard, the house door closed. "No rain tomorrow." A breeze was blowing off the river. Joseph Cory had shown his son the inviolate shining of Polaris. "That star tells sailors where the north is, Ben. It never changes." "Why, don't they alway know that?" "Compasses sometimes fail. Nothing distracts Polaris." Later he carried Ben up to bed and sat by him in the dark a while, speaking of a book of voyages by one Hakluyt, promising he would try to secure a copy and they would read it together. And he wrote of it afterward to Uncle John, who sent it as a gift with Ben's name in his own hand. Now it would be smoke. In the Springfield house, boards squeaked upstairs--probably an attic bedroom for Jonas Lloyd and his sad wife. A rooster somewhere woke with the abrupt foolishness of his kind and crowed four times. Jesse Plum would say that was a sign somebody would give you money in four days, or maybe four changes of the moon. "Thou didst have a sister, Ben, and thou too small to understand, who lived but a few days. If Ru dies, so I keep thee I'll bear it somehow. North, right of the meeting-house, up a little--that is Polaris." He said that. In devotions at Deerfield, Ben's father had often read from the Book of Job, as his mother owned a fondness for the Epistle of James. _Where is the way where light dwelleth?_ * * * * * The voice exclaimed: "Behold the judgment true and righteous on those conceived in sin and born in iniquity!" Then for Reuben the dark was pierced with little fires that grew, and in growing illuminated many writhing faces in the pit, and blackened arms that could not quite reach the rim of it. This was the pit where blood boiled in the veins and burst them, yet one never died, never.