What a wondrous creature is man! What feats the humblest among us
perform, which, if related of another order of beings, we should deem
incredible!
By what magic could the young student escape the weary old professor,
who was prosily proving Time merely a form of thought; a proposition of
which, to judge by the little value he appeared to set on the subject
of his discourse, he must himself have been fully persuaded? Without
exciting his suspicions in the smallest degree, the student stole away
to a region inconceivably remote, and presented himself at the portal
of a magnificent palace, guarded by goblins, imps, lions, serpents, and
monsters whose uncouthness forbids description.
A singular transformation seemed to have befallen the student. In the
professor’s class he had been noted as timid, awkward, and painfully
respectful. He now strode up with an air of alacrity and defiance,
brandishing a roll of parchments, and confronted the seven principal
goblins, by whom he was successively interrogated.
“Hast thou undergone the seven probations?”
“Yes,” said the student.
“Hast thou swallowed the ninety-nine poisons?”
“Ninety-nine times each,” said the student.
“Hast thou wedded a Salamander, and divorced her?”
“I have,” said the student.
“Art thou at this present time betrothed to a Vampire?”
“I am,” said the student.
“Hast thou sacrificed thy mother and sister to the infernal powers?”
“Of course,” said the student,
“Hast thou attestations of all these circumstances under the hands and
seals of a thousand and one demons?”
The student displayed his parchments.
“Thou hast undergone every trial,” pronounced the seventh goblin; “thou
hast won the right to enter the treasury of the treasurer of all
things, and to choose from it any one talisman at thy liking.”
The imps cheered, the goblins congratulated, the serpents shrank
hissing away, the lions fawned upon the student, a centaur bore him
upon his back to the treasurer’s presence,
The treasurer, an old bent man, with a single lock of silvery hair,
received the adventurer with civility.
“I have come,” said the student, “for the talismans in thy keeping, to
the choice among which I have entitled myself.”
“Thou hast fairly earned them,” replied the old man, “and I may not say
thee nay. Thou canst, however, only possess any of them in the shape
which it has received at my hands during the long period for which
these have remained in my custody.”
“I must submit to the condition,” said the student.
“Behold, then, Aladdin’s lamp,” said the ancient personage, tendering a
tiny vase hardly bigger than a pill-box, containing some grains of a
coarse, rusty powder.
“Aladdin’s lamp!” cried the student.
“All of it, at least, that I have seen fit to preserve,” replied the
old man. “Thou art but just in time for this even. It is proper to
apprise thee that the virtues of the talisman having necessarily
dwindled with its bulk, it is at present incompetent to evoke any
Genie, and can at most summon an imp, of whose company thou wilt never
be able to rid thyself, inasmuch as the least friction will inevitably
destroy what little of the talisman remains.”
“Confusion!” cried the young man, “Show me, then, Aladdin’s ring.”
“Here,” replied the old man, producing a plain gold hoop,
“This, at least,” asked the student, “is not devoid of virtue?”
“Assuredly not, if placed on the finger of some fair lady. For, its
magic properties depending wholly upon certain engraved characters,
which I have gradually obliterated, it is at present unadapted to any
other use than that of a wedding-ring, which it would subserve to
admiration.”
“Produce another talisman,” commanded the youth,
“These,” said the ancient treasurer, holding up two shapeless pieces of
leather, “are the shoes of swiftness, incomparable until I wore them
out.”
“This, at least, is bright and weighty,” exclaimed the student, as the
old man displayed the sword of sharpness.
“In truth a doughty weapon,” returned the treasurer, “if wielded by a
stronger arm than thine, for it will no longer fly in the air and smite
off heads of its own accord, since the new blade hath been fitted to
the new hilt.”
After a hasty inspection of the empty frame of a magic mirror, and a
fragment of the original setting of Solomon’s seal, the youth’s eye
lighted upon a volume full of mysterious characters.
“Whose book is this?” he inquired. “Heavens, it is Michael Scott’s!”
“Even so,” returned the venerable man, “and its spells have lost
nothing of their efficacy. But the last leaf, containing the formula
for dismissing spirits after they have been summoned from the nether
world, hath been removed by me. Inattention to this circumstance hath
caused several most respectable magicians to be torn in pieces, and
hath notably increased the number of demons at large.”
“Thou old villain!” shouted the exasperated youth, “is this the way in
which the treasures in thy custody are protected by thee? Deemest thou
that I will brook being thus cheated of my dear-bought talisman? Nay,
but I will deprive thee of thine. Give me that lock of hair.”
“O good youth,” supplicated the now terrified and humbled old man,
“bereave me not of the source of all my power. Think, only think of the
consequences!”
“I will not think,” roared the youth. “Deliver it to me, or I’ll rend
it from thy head with my own hands.”
With a heavy sigh, Time clipped the lock from his brow and handed it to
the youth, who quitted the place unmolested by any of the monsters.
Entering the great city, the student made his way by narrow and winding
streets until, after a considerable delay, he emerged into a large
public square. It was crowded with people, gazing intently at the
afternoon sky, and the air was rife with a confused murmur of
altercations and exclamations.
“It is.” “No, I tell you, it is impossible.” “It cannot be.” “I see it
move.” “No, it’s only my eyes are dazzled.” “Who could have believed
it?” “Whatever will happen next?”
Following the gaze of the people, the youth discovered that the object
of their attention was the sun, in whose aspect, however, he could
discover nothing unusual.
“No,” a man by him was saying, “it positively has not moved for an
hour. I have my instruments by me. I cannot possibly be mistaken.”
“It ought to have been behind the houses long ago,” said another.
“What’s o’clock?” asked a third. The inquiry made many turn their eyes
towards the great clock in the square. It had stopped an hour ago. The
hands were perfectly motionless. All who had watches simultaneously
drew them from their pockets. The motion of each was suspended; so
intense, in turn, was the hush of the breathless crowd, that you could
have heard a single tick, but there was none to hear.
“Time is no more,” proclaimed a leader among the people.
“I am a ruined man,” lamented a watchmaker.
“And I,” ejaculated a maker of almanacks.
“What of quarter-day?” inquired a landlord and a tenant simultaneously.
“We shall never see the moon again,” sobbed a pair of lovers.
“It is well this did not happen at night,” observed an optimist.
“Indeed?” questioned the director of a gas company.
“I told you the Last Day would come in our time,” said a preacher.
It was still long before the people realised that the trance of Time
had paralysed his daughter Mutability as well. Every operation
depending on her silent processes was arrested. The unborn could not
come to life. The sick could not die. The human frame could not waste.
Every one in the enjoyment of health and strength felt assured of the
perpetual possession of these blessings, unless he should meet with
accident or violent death. But all growth ceased, and all dissolution
was stayed. Mothers looked with despair on infants who could never be
weaned or learn to walk. Expectant heirs gazed with dismay on immortal
fathers and uncles. The reigning beauties, the fashionable boxers and
opera dancers were in the highest feather. Nor did the intellectual
less rejoice, counting on endless life and unimpaired faculties, and
vowing to extend human knowledge beyond the conceivable. The poor and
the outcast, the sick and the maimed, the broken-hearted and the dying
made, indeed, a dismal outcry, the sincerity of which was doubted by
some persons.
As for our student, forgetting his faithful Vampire, he made his way to
a young lady of great personal attractions, to whom he had been
attached in former days. The sight of her beauty, and the thought that
it would be everlasting, revived his passion. To convince her of the
perpetuity of her charms, and establish a claim upon her gratitude, he
cautiously revealed to her that he was the author of this blissful
state of things, and that Time’s hair was actually in his possession.
“Oh, you dear good man!” she exclaimed, “how vastly I am obliged to
you! Ferdinand will never forsake me now.”
“Ferdinand! Leonora, I thought you cared for _me_.”
“Oh!” she said, “you young men of science are so conceited!”
The discomfited lover fled from the house, and sought the treasurer’s
palace. It had vanished with all its monsters. Long did he roam the
city ere he mixed again with the crowd, which an old meteorologist was
addressing energetically.
“I ask you one thing,” he was saying. “Will it ever rain again?”
“Certainly not,” replied a geologist and a metaphysician together.
“Rain being an agent of Time in the production of change, there can be
no place for it under the present dispensation.”
“Then will not the crops be burned up? Will the fruits mature? Are they
not withering already? What of wells and rivers, and the mighty sea
itself? Who will feed your cattle? And who will feed _you_?”
“This concerns us,” said the butchers and bakers.
“Us also,” added the fishmongers.
“I always thought,” said a philosopher, “that this phenomenon must be
the work of some malignant wizard.”
“Show us the wizard that we may slay him,” roared the mob.
Leonora had been communicative, and the student was immediately
identified by twenty persons. The lock of hair was found upon him, and
was held up in sight of the multitude.
“Kill him!”
“Burn him!”
“Crucify him!”
“It moves! it moves!” cried another division of the crowd. All eyes
were bent on the hitherto stationary luminary. It was moving—no, it
wasn’t; yes, it certainly was. Dared men believe that their shadows
were actually lengthening? Was the sun’s rim really drawing nigh yonder
great edifice? That muffled sound from the vast, silent multitude was,
doubtless, the quick beating of innumerable hearts; but that sharper
note? Could it be the ticking of watches? Suddenly all the public
clocks clanged the first stroke of an hour—an absurdly wrong hour, but
it was an hour. No mortal heard the second stroke, drowned in universal
shouts of joy and gratitude. The student mingled with the mass, no man
regarding him.
When the people had somewhat recovered from their emotion, they fell to
disputing as to the cause of the last marvel. No scientific man could
get beyond a working hypothesis. The mystery was at length solved by a
very humble citizen, a barber.
“Why,” he said, “the old gentleman’s hair has grown again!”
And so it had! And so it was that the unborn came to life, the dying
gave up the ghost, Leonora pulled out a grey hair, and the student told
the professor his dream.