the other. His most venial fault may be tracked
through the even tenor of his life. He is nobly
of a piece. There is no varnish or veneering,
no whitened sepulchre work. Wherever we take
up the thread of his life, we find the same bold
outspoken shape of speech — the same quaint
grotesque combination of idea to which the
unintelligent have given the name of bulls. Let
us give him this credit, at least, and this gracious
allowance. In his department, whatever doubts
may be raised about its importance, he was useful.

There is a starling inseparably associated with
the name of Mr. Sterne; the famous bird of Sir
Boyle Roche should be engraven on his
tombstone.

CLOCK FAST, FIVE HUNDRED YEARS.

I DIDN'T like the man at all. He bothered
me. What did I care for his high-flying schemes?
If there is anything I hate it is a projector.
Had I but known what a failure this creature,
who promised so well at first, would turn out to
be, when taken up with — Why, he was as great
a failure as any of his own preposterous notions
could turn out to be, if there were lunatics in the
world far enough gone to take up with them! — I
would rather have strangled him than asked
him to dine with me at my lodgings in Essex-
street, Strand. The wildness of his perpetual
suggestions gave me indigestion. How could a
human system assimilate soup in presence of a
fire of practical hints of the waste things of the
world—tallow-graves for example — whereof a
delicious soup could be made by a perfected
chemistry? The last thing to be done with a fish,
this fellow thought, was to eat it. Until it had been
employed in commerce for a century or two, and
had served fifty other uses, it should not, he said,
be eaten. But then, indeed, it might restore its
constituents to the perfected cook, and by him,
chemically refreshed, be served up deliciously to
table, shaped in a mould like jelly, into the
restored semblance of fish. Bah! He even
longed for the day to come when an entremet of
old boots should be relished at the tables of the
great, and when a poor man who had worn his
clothes out should know how to cook them into
palatable food. I promise him a pair of boiled
trousers if he ever dines with me again, and I
will eat my hat if he does.

He talked to me after dinner till my head
span round, and I lay back in my arm-chair
while he gabbled on. Then, suddenly, with a
pull at his peaked beard, and a twirl at his long
spits of moustaches, up he got and dug a long
forefinger into the middle of the clock upon my
mantelpiece. A clock I am proud of. A clock
that never goes wrong. The cleverest clock in
town, with hands of all sorts to tell you the
day of the month, the day of the week, how old
you are, what's o'clock at Otaheite, and when
you are likely to be married. He stuck his
long nail-barbed forefinger into the axle of the
minute and hour hands, whereupon round they
went. Hours, days, months, flew by with a rush
and a whiz, and in five minutes this fellow, this
Chevalier Narrenpossenindiezukunft, pulled his
finger out again, and said,

"It's five hundred years, old fellow, since we
dined. Shall we have tea?"

I rang the bell testily, and the bell-pull
crumbled down in my hand. As I went to the
door to call on the stairs, I stumbled over a long
grey beard that hung from my chin. And when I
reached the place of the door, where was the door?

"By Jove," I said, " we are bricked in."

"Not at all. Look," said the chevalier.

The door was in the ceiling.

"Listen," said the chevalier.

Somebody was tapping at it. Open it I
couldn't. So I said, "Come in."

The door opened, and I am afraid to say what
I saw at first was what seemed to be the belly fin
of a tremendous turbot. The turbot flew aside a
little, and a young lady, who rode on his back,
dismounted and floated down to us in a balloon
skirt. The chevalier shook hands with her,
introduced her to me as his sister, a lady who,
having been, five hundred years ago, sole mistress
of her time, agreed to wait till now — then — when?
—before she called me to be hers. "It is now,"
she said, "the first of April, in the year, two
thousand three hundred and sixty-three. So
come along with me. This fish will carry three."
She gave us the train of her skirt to stand upon,
and so we went up to the door with her, and sat
with her on the back of her turbot, which was
very comfortably furnished with air cushions.
The lady took the reins, and off we started.

"Well, Bokins," said the chevalier to me,
laughing, " what do you say now? I see
the precise situation. This is nothing more
than I expected."

"Narrenpossen-what's-your-name?" I
answered. "If you see the precise situation, I
don't. My lodgings were in Essex-street,
Strand. Where's Essex-street? Where's the
Strand? Where's—come, now, where' s the
Thames? I see nothing but gardens, groves,
and grassy lanes, and shining terraces, and a
great sweep of greensward, on which men are
running foot-races, and there is a strange peopling
of the air, and there are strange humming throbs
from under ground."

"Of course there are," said the chevalier.
"That is the busy hum of London traffic,
going on night and day, with the speed of
lightning. Thames! Why you don't suppose
in all these years we have stood still at your
old strips and shreds of bridge. It is all
bridge now, my boy. Thames is an underground
river, at least as far as Gravesend. It runs
under that sweep of green playground. And
there is plenty of traffic, be sure, of which
in these good days that are come, we no more
see the circulation on the face of the town, than
we see the circulation of the blood — otherwise
than as a bloom of health upon my sister's face
there. All you see on the surface of this lovely
London, is the bloom."

"Bloom, indeed! Why, if those blossoming
groves are the streets, how do you come by so