Vertebrata could hardly wait to have breakfast before she tried it, and then she ran and brought her pipes and sat down beside the circle. And her father did not go to his hunting, or her mother to her cooking and cave-tidying, but they both sat there with Vertebrata, hearing her pipe and watching the shadow finger move, and waiting till her mother should feel the feeling of enough.
Now! Since the world began, the Hours, Minutes, and Seconds had been hanging over it, waiting patiently until people should understand about them. But nobody before had ever, ever thought about them, and Vertebrata and her mother and her father were the very first ones who had even begun to understand.
So it chanced that in the second that Vertebrata began to pipe and the bone was laid on the circle, that Second (deep in the air and yet as near as time is to us) knew that it was being marked off at last on the soft circle of the earth, and so did the next Second, and the next, and the next, and the next, until sixty of them knew—and there was the first Minute, measured in the circle before the cave. And other Minutes knew what was happening, and they all came hurrying likewise, and they filled the air with exquisite, invisible presences—all to the soft sound of little Vertebrata’s piping. And she piped, and piped, on the lovely, reedy, blow-on-it instrument, and she made sweet music. And for the first time in her little life, her practising became to her not merely practising, but music-making—there, while she watched the strange Time-shadow move.
“J—o—y!” cried the Seconds, talking among themselves. “People are beginning to know about us. It is time that they should.”
“Ah!” they cried again. “We can go faster than anything.”
“Think of all of our poor brothers and sisters that have gone, without anybody knowing they were here,” they mourned.
“Pipe, pipe, pipe,” went Vertebrata, and the little Seconds danced by almost as if she were making them with her piping.
The Minutes, too, said things to one another—who knows if Time is so silent as we imagine? May not all sorts of delicate conversations go on in the heart of time about which we never know anything—Second talking with Second, and Minute answering to Minute; and the grave Hours, listening to everything we say and seeing everything we do, confiding things to the Day about us and about Eternity from which they have come. I cannot tell you what they say about you—you will know that, if you try to think, and especially if you stand close to a great clock or hear it boom out in the night. And I cannot tell you what they say about Eternity. But I think that this may be one of the songs that they sing:—
SONG OF THE MINUTES
We are a garland for men,