There seemed no help for it, and Ralph replied, "I will, if the hour be an early one."
"Nine o'clock," replied the magistrate, with a laugh; "we are all early men. I hold you to your word, then; and you too, Master What's-your-name. Clerk, make out the bail-bond for him; we won't be too particular as to the property."
Once more, there was no help for it; and it is good policy in life, as Ralph well knew, to submit patiently to that for which there is no help. The clerk, however, was tediously slow--people always are slow when we want them to be quick, and by the time the whole business was concluded, and the young gentleman had once more issued forth into the air, the clock in the old steeple was striking five.
A little crowd had gathered about the doors of the justice room, and they greeted Ralph when he appeared at liberty with a warm-hearted cheer. He got clear of the people as soon as he could, however, and, followed by the servants of the Duke of Norfolk and Lady Danvers, made his way back to the inn. A day from which he had expected some of those golden moments which are the treasures of the heart, had nearly passed by without affording him one look of her he loved.
CHAPTER XVIII.
How often, as society is constituted, does the passing of one single hour affect the whole of the hours that gather into life. A moment is sometimes enough; but it is more frequently an hour--two hours--an evening.
I wonder if it was so with the patriarchs. I rather think not; for if so, they would not have lived so long. If Methuselah had gone on at the rail-road pace at which we live in modern days--if he had crowded into each day of life the same amount of thought, sensation, act, event, which now fills up the space of every four-and-twenty hours, between seventeen and seventy, the whole history of the world, in its hundred thousand folio tomes, would have been a joke to the annals of his existence. But we make a great mistake if we think those old gentlemen, in any thing, lived as fast as we do; and this, I feel sure, was the secret of their longevity.
Oh no, they moved from place to place, with their flocks and herds, traveling not much more than five or six miles a day. They struck their tents in the morning; they pitched them in the evening; they milked their cows, tended their "much cattle," and the day was done. Sometimes they did not even strike their tents at all, but remained upon one spot, till, like the locusts, they had eaten up every green thing. An occasional combat with a lion or a bear--a fight with a neighboring herdsman, or the procuration of venison "to make savory meat," was an event agreeably diversifying the monotony of existence; and I have a strong notion that thought and feeling marched at as slow a rate as all the rest.
Thus was it, probably, that their thoughts were so grand, their feelings so powerful. In mighty masses, they moved slow; but whatever they touched they overwhelmed.
We, on the contrary, can never go too fast; forgetting that there is but a certain portion of life allotted to every man, and that life is not mere time, measured by suns or moons, but a certain amount of action, event, idea, sensation. We crowd more into seven days than a patriarch put into seven years; and then we wonder that life is so brief, that so little time has been allowed us.