XXXIV
THE MAN WITHOUT A WATCH
Thomas Morley knew the value of promptitude. He was a young man on whom ninety-two seasons had poured benefits and adversities, although many of the latter he took to be the former, his temperament shedding sorrow as a duck does water, to use a castanean simile.
He was a born and bred New-Yorker, but at the time of which we write he had been living for the last ten or twelve months in Uxton, up among the hills of northwestern Connecticut, studying the natives; for he was a writer.
Having filled a portfolio with material for enough dialect stories to run one of the great magazines for a year, he determined to seek his matter in the metropolis, and to that end applied for a reportership on the New York “Courier-Journal,” in which paper many of his brightest things had appeared at remunerative rates.
As has been said, he knew the value of promptitude, so when, at eight o’clock one night, Farmer Phelps’s hired man handed him a letter from James Fitzgerald, managing editor of the “Courier-Journal,” asking him to come and see him in regard to a reportership as soon as possible, he made up his mind to take the train which left Winsonia, four miles distant, at six o’clock next morning. This would enable him to reach the office by half-past ten, and probably catch Mr. Fitzgerald on his arrival at his desk.
Next morning he arose at four, and when he left the house he had sixty minutes in which to walk four miles downhill—ample time, surely.
It was so ample that he would have had fifteen minutes to spare if the home clock had been right. As it was, he arrived at the station in time to see the train rapidly disappearing around a curve, on its way to New York. He laughed good-naturedly with the baggageman, and asked him when the next down train was due.