And she brought her indictment against a raucous timepiece which was wont to lead up to its striking with a long, preliminary clack-and-whirr, alleging that twice, when she had quit her sculping early because the clay was obdurate and wouldn’t come right, and had gone for a walk to clear her vision, the clock had accosted her in these unjustifiable terms:
“Clacketty-whirr-rr-rr! Back-to-yer-worr-rr-rrk! Yerr-rr-rr-rr wrong! wrong! wrong! wrong!”
“Wherefore,” said the Bonnie Lassie, “your appellant prays that you be a dear, good, stern, forbidding Dominie and go over to Number 37 and ask him what he means by it, anyway, and tell him he’s got to stop it.”
Now, the Bonnie Lassie holds the power of the high, the middle, and the low justice over all Our Square by the divine right of loveliness and kindliness. So that evening I went while the Little Red Doctor, as a self-constituted Committee in Waiting, sat on my bench. Stepfather Time himself opened the door to me.
“What might they call you, sir, if I may ask?” he inquired with timid courtesy.
“They might call me the Dominie hereabouts. And they do.”
“I have heard of you.” He motioned me to a seat in the bare little room, alive with tickings and clickings. “You have lived long here, sir?”
“Long.”
From some interminable distance a voice of time mocked me with a subtle and solemn mockery: “Long. Long. Long.”
My host waited for the clock to finish before he spoke again. As I afterward discovered, this was his invariable custom.