A PERSONAL TRIUMPH.
Always at the same point of my railway journey North I drop my paper and wait till a certain trim red-roofed ivy-clad cottage comes into view across the fields to the right. Till yesterday there were two reasons why I should hail this cottage with delight. First of all, it stands where trim cottages are rarer than pit-heads and slag heaps; and, secondly, GEORGE STEPHENSON once lived there. From now onwards, however, I have a third and more compelling reason for respecting the old building. You shall hear.
Know, then, that I have a friend called Smithson. The Athenians would have had a short way with him; and I admit that there have been times in the course of our relationship when hemlock would really have been the only thing to meet the case. Our conversations (it is no fault of mine) are always dialectical. They take the following form. Light-heartedly I enunciate a proposition. Smithson is interested and asks for a clearer statement. I modify my original position. Smithson purrs. Seeing trouble imminent, I modify my modification, and from that point onwards I make a foredoomed but not (as I flatter myself) an unplucky fight against relentless logic. The elenchus comes soon or late, but it always comes. Only in dreams am I ever one up on Smithson. The old trick of cramming up hard parts of the Encyclopædia overnight is no good. I tried it once with "Hegesippus" and "The Hegira." You don't know what either of these words mean? Smithson did—and he knew the articles. No doubt he and Mr. GLADSTONE had written them in collaboration.
Well, yesterday, Smithson and I were in the neighbourhood of the cottage which I have told you of. Having an hour to spare from work of national importance, we took our sandwiches and were eating them in view of the jolly old house.
"What's that thing over the door?" I said.
"That I take to be a sun-dial," said Smithson with his accustomed reserve of strength.
"What a delightful stile," I said. (You always have stiles on sun-dials. I knew that).
"Quâ stile it is perfect. What do you make of the inscription?"
I went at it bald-headed. "Percunt et imputantur," I said.
"You may be right, of course," replied Smithson, "though it certainly begins with an A."
"True," I corrected. "Anno Domini."
"Conceivably—but the second letter is a U."
I left Smithson painfully to reconstruct A-U-G-U-S-T from among the ivy. He had got to the M of a long date when a burst of sun cast a crisp shadow across the dial.
"I don't think much of GEORGE STEPHENSON after all," I said. "His beastly clock doesn't know the right time."
Smithson snorted. Here was a challenge to the omniscient.
"That's all right," he said, recovering himself in a moment "All properly constructed dials have a compensating table; we shall find one no doubt behind the ivy; there! I see it, to the left—a compensating table by which you have to correct the actual record of the shadow. For example, we are now in Lat. 55 N. The month is April. At Greenwich—"
But I wasn't listening. A bright truth had flashed into my mind, and I couldn't hold myself back any longer. "It's just about an hour slow," I said. "You don't think that Daylight Saving has anything to do with it, do you?"
Busdriver.—"ALL RIGHT—ALL RIGHT! I SEE YER, YER NEEDN'T KEEP ON SURRENDERING."
"About twenty-four hours later one of the ship's officers saw something bobbing on the water a few hundred years dead ahead."—New York Evening Post.
America evidently foresees a long war.