And dwelt upon the pleasant way;
‘To-morrow,’ cried they, one and all,
While no one spoke of yesterday.
Then life stood still at blessed noon,
I, only I, had passed away:
‘To-morrow and to-day,’ they cried:
I was of yesterday.”
It is a critical point in Mr. Charles Reade’s story of what he calls very hard cash, when Noah Skinner, the fraudulent banker’s clerk, old and dying, proposes to himself, and resolves to deliver up, to-morrow, the receipt for fourteen thousand pounds, his criminal possession and crafty retention of which has caused such profound and wide-spread misery. “A sleepy languor now came over him; ... but his resolution remained unshaken; by-and-by waking up from a sort of heavy dose, he took, as it were a last look at the receipt, and murmured, ‘My head, how heavy it feels.’ But presently he roused himself, full of his penitent resolution, and murmured again brokenly, ‘I’ll—take it to—Pembroke-street to—morrow: to—mor—row.” Fool—like other us fools of nature—that night his soul was required of him. The to-morrow found him, and so did the detectives, dead.
Among other visitors and applicants at the mystical Intelligence Office thrown open to our gaze by Nathaniel Hawthorne, there totters hastily in a grandfatherly personage, so earnest in his uniform alacrity that his white hair floats backwards as he hurries up to the desk, while his dim eyes catch a momentary lustre from his vehemence of purpose. This venerable figure explains that he is in search of To-morrow.
“I have spent all my life in pursuit of it,” adds the sage old gentleman, “being assured that To-morrow has some vast benefit or other in store for me. But I am now getting a little in years, and must make haste, for unless I overtake To-morrow soon, I begin to be afraid it will finally escape me.”