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        "Watch!"
        Four, three, two, one.
        "There! There! Oh, there, there!"
        They both cried out. They both stood. The chairs toppled back, fell flat on the lawn. The man and his wife swayed, their hands struggled to find each other, grip, hold. They saw the brightening color in the sky and, ten seconds later, the great uprising comet bum the air, put out the stars, and rush away in fire flight to become another star in the returning profusion of the Milky Way. The man and wife held each other as if they had stumbled on the rim of an incredible cliff that faced an abyss so deep and dark there seemed no end to it. Staring up, they heard themselves sobbing and crying. Only after a long time were they able to speak.
        "It got away, it did, didn't it?"
        "Yes . . ."
        "It's all right, isn't it?"
        "Yes . . . yes .. ."
        "It didn't fall back . . . ?"
        "No, no, it's all right, Bob's all right, it's all right."
        They stood away from each other at last.
        He touched his face with his hand and looked at his wet fingers. "I'll be," he said, "I'll be. . . ."
        They waited another five and then ten minutes until the darkness in their heads, the retina, ached with a million specks of fiery salt. Then they had to close their eyes.
        "Well," she said, "now let's go in."
        He could not move. Only his hand reached a long way out by itself to find the lawn-mower handle. He saw what his hand had done and said, "There's just a little more to do. . . ."
        "But you can't see."
        "Well enough," he said. "I must finish this. Then we'll sit on the porch awhile before we turn in."
        He helped her put the chairs on the porch and sat her down and then walked back out to put his hands on the guide bar of the lawn mower. The lawn mower. A wheel in a wheel. A simple machine which you held in your hands, which you sent on ahead with a rush and a clatter while you walked behind with your quiet philosophy. Racket, followed by warm silence. Whirling wheel, then soft footfall of thought.
        I'm a billion years old, he told himself; I'm one minute old. I'm one inch, no, ten thousand miles, tall. I look down and can't see my feet they're so far off and gone away below.
        He moved the lawn mower. The grass showering up fell softly around him; he relished and savored it and felt that he was all mankind bathing at last in the fresh waters of the fountain of youth.
        Thus bathed, he remembered the song again about the wheels and the faith and the grace of God being way up there in the middle of the sky where that single star, among a million motionless stars, dared to move and keep on moving.
        Then he finished cutting the grass.

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
THE FOG HORN
     
     
    Out there in the cold water, far from land, we waited every night for the coming of the fog, and it came, and we oiled the brass machinery and lit the fog light up in the stone tower. Feeling like two birds in the gray sky, McDunn and I sent the light touching out, red, then white, then red again, to eye the lonely ships. And if they did not see our light, then there was always our Voice, the great deep cry of our Fog Horn shuddering through the rags of mist to startle the gulls away like decks of scattered cards and make the waves turn high and foam.
        "It's a lonely life, but you're used to it now, aren't you?" asked McDunn.
        "Yes," I said. "You're a good talker, thank the Lord."
        "Well, it's your turn on land tomorrow," he said, smiling, "to dance the ladies and drink gin."
        "What do you think, McDunn, when I leave you out here alone?"
        "On the mysteries of the sea." McDunn lit his pipe. It was a quarter past seven of a cold November evening, the heat on, the light switching its tail in two hundred directions, the Fog Horn bumbling in the high throat of the tower. There wasn't a town for a hundred