and fly away, without giving me the slightest
notice, leaving me only memorials—souvenirs
in the shape of frayed button-holes, and
punctured stocks, and rusty morocco cases—
memorials as melancholily tantalising as a
used-up cheque book, or a champagne bill
that has been paid. This watch won't go—
through fair and foul weather, through good
and evil report, it adheres to me. " We clomb
the hill thegither; "  and perhaps it will sleep
with me at the foot thereof, when I go to the
land where John Anderson my Jo, and many,
many more Johns and Jo's have gone before me.

The "duffer" is useless for time-keeping
purposes, that is certain:  I can't sell it; I
can't wear it in my waistcoat pocket, for fear
of being asked the time and not being able to
be up thereto; thus risking ridicule and shame.
I won't give it away, or hitch it out of the
window, or liquefy it in a frying pan, à la
man-o'-war's-man. Suppose that I philosophise
upon it—that I view it, "duffer" as it
is, in its relations to time and the hour—to
human energies and failures and successes—
to the march of intellect and the life of man.

To speak of Time—the venerable figure not
incommoded with drapery, with forelock,
scythe, and hour glass (the sands for ever
running), with wings, and foot for ever poised
upon the march. " Tempus fugit."  I will be
bold at once and dissent from the wise old
saw. Time does not fly. He has no wings,
no poised foot, no power of locomotion. Time
is, and was, and will be, the same— unchanged,
unchangeable, immutable. Don't make of
time an ogre, pitilessly devouring his children
as the Virgil and Homer men would make
you believe he does. Take him as he is;
calm, tranquil, unmoved by the course of
centuries, and ages, and years. Take him as
a decent, sober citizen, sleeping calmly in his
well-worn nightcap, while the sun (the real
mover, the real essence of mobility) is for
ever getting up with many a yawn and shrug
before he rises, or going to bed with many a
sigh of lassitude and weariness. Take Time as
a bridge slung high and dry, and steady as a
rock over a boiling, bubbling, crashing,
Niagara of a waterfall beneath. Perfectly
inert and stationary is this old myth. He
does not measure us. He wants us not. He
never interferes with us. We want him; we
measure him; we interfere with him. Chronos
and logos be Greek words, I think, that go to
make up chronology; and logos is the word
century, or cycle, or solstice, or equinox, or
year, or hour, or day, we tack to the skirts
of Time, and think, forsooth, that because we
call him different names at different periods,
and that those names and periods may have
ceased and determined, that we have spent
Time, or wasted Time, or employed Time.
Tempus fugit!  Time does not fly; and I do
not fly in the face of the sun-dial when I
deny the truth of the motto so often
engraved thereon. It is the golden sun-light
whose daily life and death are recorded by
the unerring finger on the brazen page, that
we waste, or spend, or employ. The sun waa
the first watchmaker, and from his rubicund
dial face tells us the time of day, to the
confusion of the Horse Guards and Mr. Bennett's
skeleton contrivance at the Crystal Palace.
King Alfred with his wax chandlery, later
patient German savants and skilled
handicraftsmen; later still, your Dents and Breguets
put his phases into cylindrical boxes and
called them watches. Savants, and priests,
and rulers had been at work, ages before,
to call so many suns and moons centuries,
years, and days. Clocks and watches gave
us hours and minutes; and now we have the
presumption to call this purely business-like
agreement and convention between Strasburg
artificers, Roman high priests, stage-managers
of Olympian games, editors of Gregorian and
other calendars, compilers of Magnall's
Questions and tables of dates, quiet workmen
in Clerkenwell, pretty damsels in the Palais
Royal, and Messrs. Partridge, Murphy, and
Raphael, the almanack-makers, Time; and
we have the assurance to say that, because the
hour runs, Time runs too; that, because the
sand slides surely, gently, slowly, inevitably
through the pin-like aperture between the
crystal cones, that Time slides, passes, too.
Our ancestors knew better:  they did not call
a clock a time-piece; they called him a
horologe.

And, if I mention ancestors, I anticipate a
storm of objections to my theory of time,
suggested by the word I have made use of.
Ancestors, my opponents will triumphantly
cry!  why, if Time had never flown or moved,
where would be your ancestors, where your
antiquity?

Now, what is antiquity?  What is this you
make such a fuss and pother about?  What
is antiquity to a man, or a man to antiquity?
What has he to do with anything but Life!
and while he racks his head about antiquity,
how many of the years, and days, and hours
that go to make up that life are irretrievably
wasted. How many minutes he casts away
right and left—like red-hot halfpence to boys.
Yet a minute, my friend, is something. A
minute!  how many years must it seem to
somebody standing on a scaffold in the chilly
morning, with the spectre of a white nightcap
grinning over his shoulder, with the
hands of Saint Sepulchre's church pointing
to one minute to eight, and with but that
minute plank between him and the deep,
deep sea of eternity. A minute—will not
the thousandth part thereof, consumed in a
nimble spring to the right or the wrong
side decide the odds between your being
landed safely on a well-swept platform heaped
with Christmas hampers, and hung 'round
with jovial banners, or placards respecting
Christmas excursion trains, and your being
crushed to death beneath the remorseless
wheels of that same excursion train, as it
glides heavily along the treacherous rails