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was it “Nay”? What was that odd accent, or inflection? Had it developed from some originally minor quirk of speech by the Quenan community’s isolation?—or from some other tongue?—or from both?) “—no, I shall choose one for myself. Each hand knows its own need best, Storesman. Place the broken one in the repairs bin for the Carpentersmith.”
    Murmuring, “So, Teacher,” Storicai the Storesman obeyed (in a community like this, Ellery thought, waste-not-want-not would be more a matter of survival than of thrift); but the Storesman did so with his eyes still on the stranger, on and away and on and away.
    The Teacher’s voice came from the shadows. “When last you saw our guest, Storicai, you did not know, nor did I know, that he was to be here amongst us. He it is who was foretold. It is a great thing that has been visited upon us, Storesman, a very great thing.” The voice, so old, so strong, fell silent.
    The Storesman’s eyes widened with that same wonder Ellery had seen throughout Quenan. Rather restlessly, Ellery stirred. A stray sunbeam picked out his wrist watch, and it glittered. The Storesman uttered a little cry.
    “Oh,” he said. “Oh.”
    “My wrist watch—”
    “Oh!”
    The watch was of gold, and wafer-thin, his father’s birthday present to him of some years earlier. It showed not only the time of day but the day of the month as well, and the year, and the phases of the moon. Only the last, Ellery now thought, seemed fitting to this valley. New moon and old moon: what other reckoning was needed in this little lost land—land which time forgot, to its contentment?
    “Haven’t you ever seen a wrist watch?” Ellery asked, raising his arm.
    The Storesman’s bearded face was broad with amazement. “A timepiece to wear on the hand? No, no.”
    “Then you have seen watches of other kinds? And clocks?”
    Ellery hoped that he did not sound like the mighty white man patronizing the child of nature. But it turned out that Storicai was familiar with watches and clocks. There were a few watches in Quenan (Ellery saw some of them later—great, grave grandfathers of pocket timepieces, wound by key, which must have crossed the prairies behind oxen leaning heavily into the endlessly stretching grass), and a few clocks, too. “Clocks with hands,” the Storesman explained with pride, although it appeared that most of them were hourglasses, and some sundials (“for shadow-time”) and some water clocks (“for night-time”).
    On impulse Ellery slipped the watch off his wrist. Storicai’s eyes opened even wider at the flexible action of the metal-mesh band. “This is what it does,” Ellery said. “And this … and this.”
    “But the key. I see no keyhole.”
    “It keeps winding itself up, Storicai. Through the ordinary movements of the arm.”
    The Storesman touched the wrist watch timidly. Again it glittered, and the glitter reflected from his eyes. For a moment Ellery wondered if the gleam signified wonder so much as cupidity. Or perhaps neither, he thought. Or something else, or nothing else.
    “Here is the new knife I have chosen,” said the Teacher, returning. “It fits my hand well.”
    The Storesman nodded, turning reluctantly from Ellery’s watch. He drew toward him a huge ledgerlike tome, a sort of log or daybook that looked homemade; and in this tome he recorded the transaction of the knives. When he was finished, Ellery—again on impulse—held the wrist watch out to him. “I have another one I can use while I am here,” he said to Storicai. “Would you like to wear this one until I leave?”
    Storicai’s eyes shone as he turned automatically to the Teacher. And the old man smiled and nodded as if to a child. Ellery slipped his watch over Storicai’s thick wrist; and as he and the Teacher left the storehouse. Ellery glanced back to see the bearded man turning the gold watch this way and that in the shaft of sunlight.
    “Your temple, is that it?—or your, well, town