"What would you say to me," he went on--and now it seemed to me that
his smile suggested rather pitying condescension than kindly
toleration--"what would you say to me, if I were to tell you that I
myself have seen all the many visions unrolled before you in these
instruments? What would you say, if I declared that I had gazed on the
dances of Salome and of Esmeralda? that I had beheld the combat of
Achilles and Hector and the mounted fight of Saladin and the Knight of
the Leopard?"
"You are not Time himself?" I asked in amaze.
He laughed lightly, and without bitterness or mockery.
"No," he answered, promptly, "I am not Time himself. And why should you
think so? Have I a scythe? Have I an hour-glass? Have I a forelock? Do
I look so very old, then?"
I examined him more carefully to answer this last question, and the
more I scrutinized him the more difficult I found it to declare his
age. At first I had thought him to be forty, perhaps, or of a certainty
less than fifty. But now, though his hair was black, though his eye was
bright, though his step was firm, though his gestures were free and
sweeping, I had my doubts; and I thought I could perceive, one after
another, many impalpable signs of extreme old age.
Then, all at once, he grew restive under my fixed gaze.
"But it is not about me that we need to waste time now," he said,
impatiently. "You have seen what two of my instruments contain; would
you like now to examine the contents of the other two?"