Clocks | Page 4

"Come to my church, all ye that want to go to Heaven, and buy my
penny weekly guide, and pay my pew-rates; and, pray ye, have nothing
to do with my misguided brother over the road. This is the only safe
way!"
"Oh, vote for me, my noble and intelligent electors, and send our party
into power, and the world shall be a new place, and there shall be no
sin or sorrow any more! And each free and independent voter shall
have a bran new Utopia made on purpose for him, according to his
own ideas, with a good-sized, extra-unpleasant purgatory attached, to
which he can send everybody he does not like. Oh! do not miss this
chance!"
Oh! listen to my philosophy, it is the best and deepest. Oh! hear my
songs, they are the sweetest. Oh! buy my pictures, they alone are true
art. Oh! read my books, they are the finest.
Oh! I am the greatest cheesemonger, I am the greatest soldier, Iam the
greatest statesman, I am the greatest poet, I am the greatest showman,
I am the greatest mountebank, Iam the greatest editor, and I am the
greatest patriot. We are the greatest nation. We are the only good
people. Ours is the only true religion. Bah! how we all yell!
How we all brag and bounce, and beat the drum and shout; and
nobody believes a word we utter; and the people ask one another,

saying:
"How can we tell who is the greatest and the cleverest among all these
shrieking braggarts?"
And they answer:
"There is none great or clever. The great and clever men are not here;
there is no place for them in this pandemonium of charlatans and
quacks. The men you see here are crowing cocks. We suppose the
greatest and the best of them are they who crow the loudest and the
longest; that is the only test of their merits."
Therefore, what is left for us to do, but to crow? And the best and
greatest of us all, is he who crows the loudest and the longest on this
little dunghill that we call our world!
Well, I was going to tell you about our clock.
It was my wife's idea, getting it, in the first instance. We had been to
dinner at the Buggles', and Buggles had just bought a clock--"picked it
up in Essex," was the way he described the transaction. Buggles is
always going about "picking up" things. He will stand before an old
carved bedstead, weighing about three tons, and say:
"Yes--pretty little thing! I picked it up in Holland;" as though he had
found it by the roadside, and slipped it into his umbrella when nobody
was looking!
Buggles was rather full of this clock. It was of the good old-fashioned
"grandfather" type. It stood eight feet high, in a carved-oak case, and
had a deep, sonorous, solemn tick, that made a pleasant
accompaniment to the after-dinner chat, and seemed to fill the room
with an air of homely dignity.
We discussed the clock, and Buggles said how he loved the sound of its
slow, grave tick; and how, when all the house was still, and he and it
were sitting up alone together, it seemed like some wise old friend

talking to him, and telling him about the old days and the old ways of
thought, and the old life and the old people.
The clock impressed my wife very much. She was very thoughtful all the
way home, and, as we went upstairs to our flat, she said, "Why could
not we have a clock like that?" She said it would seem like having some
one in the house to take care of us all--she should fancy it was looking
after baby!
I have a man in Northamptonshire from whom I buy old furniture now
and then, and to him I applied. He answered by return to say that he
had got exactly the very thing I wanted. (He always has. I am very
lucky in this respect.) It was the quaintest and most old-fashioned clock
he had come across for a long while, and he enclosed photograph and
full particulars; should he send it up?
From the photograph and the particulars, it seemed, as he said, the
very thing, and I told him, "Yes; send it up at once."
Three days afterward, there came a knock at the door--there had been
other knocks at the door before this, of course; but I am dealing merely
with the history of the clock. The girl said a couple of men were outside,
and wanted to see me, and I went to them.
I found they were Pickford's carriers, and glancing at the way-bill, I
saw that it was my clock that they