THE TICK OF THE CLOCK.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 11686, 22 June 1901, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE TICK OF THE CLOCK.

[BY tohtjnga.]

Yesterday was the. shortest day. as the sun counts at Auckland. That deceptive | star was still beneath the blanketing hori- i /.on at seven by the clock, and did not ! trouble to get: up until six minutes later, j while he turned in again soon after half-past I four—to be precise, at thirty-nine minutes i past four p.m. From now on he will bo J gradually getting more energetic, until he i comers at the Yuletide to the climax of his j diurnal vigour. Yet this, of course, is only i as things seem to us—just as now it seems ! i at the Antarctic as though he took no rest j whatever, and at the distant Arctic as i though there were no sun at all. j

Things arc never exactly what (hey seem, ! in spite of the wizards who talk of the exact I sciences and pretend to measure the heavens j with a tape-line and to define times and I seasons by the tick of a chronometer. Which j great truth every boy knows who compares j the so-called quarter of a mile of an errand with the so-called four miles tint leads to i pood fishing, which is confirmed in after life \ by the first experience of the difference be- j tween the apparent five minutes of waiting ' for her at the corner and the apparent hour ! of parting from her at the gate. The sun j never really moves after all. We think it moves, according to our standpoint in the i ever-varying zones of the emotions—swiftly in the summer zone of our happiness, slowly, oh, so slowly, in the winter of our discern- I cut. j

There is a commonly held opinion that wo ought to awake at daylight and run with the sun our daily course of duty, which, if we took literally, would make us a strangely lie-a-bed race in Auckland, and a still more strangely irregular race down Otago-vay. or in the Scotland of our sires. What Scotchman does not remember the long June day;; when at midnight itself there was a streak as of dawn to the Northward, and the drear midwinter weather whtr. at midday the weary sun hung low to the Southward a* if already pining for its early bed! And what would man do at all inside either circle if lie followed faithfully this pretentious philosophy, seeing that it might call upon him t-> toil six solid months without a wink of sleep, and then to germinate for six other months without a meal. Dearly-beloved bretluen, the Scriptures do not require us to be so idiotic. The cool of an early summer morning may be a most excellent lime to sleep, hud the lamp-lit hours of a wintry night most deservedly live in all our memories as good for the children of man.

For. if we will but reason together, we may see at once that our practice is better than our precept, that most other living things are at one with us in acknowledging the beauties of the night and its fitness for activity. In the daytime most birds wake and in the night time most birds sleep, we all know. But when the domestic hen seeks her perch the domestic duck stretches its wings and feels lively, while the owl comes out on business bent, and the night-birds fill the air with their cries. Where, is the man born south of the Peak in Merrie England, who has not held his breath while the nightingale sang its matchless son:,-'.'' He is as scarce as the fisherman who does not know when the trout are hungriest, as the hunter who does not know when four-footed things most freely walk abroad.

At night. Nature wakes. Then the housedog bays to the moon his regrets for the days when the wolf-pack galloped freely beneath the stars and the tuneful cat seeks amid the forest of chimneys the relaxations it once sought amid fore; of trees. Then the rat and the mouse ramble amid the rafters as of old they rambled amid the wild oats and the bracken. Then the cow still loves to graze and. the trooping horse to wander in the ; de pastures. Awl then every man and woman who can 'ling null care behind then' and do that which their soul desires in the darkling hours which are our own. They work because of lie night and what it brings them, for the warm ingle-nook and the manifold things thai hate come from it and the humanity that ;t means. And they take as much of the night a* they well can, according to their power and their means, for the world's work must be done in the day time, and to it men and women must come fresh and willing, seeing that when the night cometh few but newspaper men can work, and none of them like to at all.

Yesterday was our shortest day, our longest night, as the sun counts, as it seems. But who shall say what is the shortest day. the longest night, to the throbbing hearts of the joyful and. the sorrowing, the happy and the sad? Who would count in hours the agony of a mother watching over her dying little one or the triumph of her sister through whom a man-child is new-born into the world? What is human time to the doomed man who steps to the scaffold at the. day-dawn and to his brother who leads a. bride to the altar and to the worn and weary man to whom light and dark, sleeping and waking, sorrow and gladness, have become alike? Surely there is something over us greater than this blind .11 verse in which some would set us. something nithin us incalculably greater than the earth on whicili we spin .ound from sunlight into shadow. For in our weakness as in our strength, in our misery as in our happiness, in our sinfulness as in our righteousness we all unconsciously thrust aside as meaningless the periods of the material universe and measure from our spiritual eternity with a spiritual perception which knows no more of clock-time than does the babe unborn. We can catch a train as we can calculate an eclipse. But a. strong man may age under the torture of a suspense that has not lasted a tick of the clock, a girl may wake as from a fair dream and find herself nursing her grandchild on the brink of the dark river. And the Christian world has set up the agony of Gcthsemane and (he martyuom of Calvary as a just and equable payment for all the guilt, of all the ages.

It was Mahomet who said tlirtl after the water-jug fell from (lie table, the angel Gabriel bore him on the great while horse A!debaran to the presence of Allah in the seventh heaven, there to hoar from Allah's lips the '"There is One God" upon which lie founded his mission, and bore him back in time to catch the water-jug unspilled before it revelled the ground. And behind his vivid Eastern metaphor, of which we have ourselves such a marvellous illustration in the Apocalypse of St. John the Divine, there is the seed of a world-wide and universal truth. To him whose soul rides tlie steed of Thought there is no Time, which is a condition affecting the material world alone.

Hut this is getting too deep altogether, and we bad better climb up into the sunlight, for whenever men get away from the beaten paths they begin to follow wandering (ires. The worst thing that can happen to a man is i!', while searching in the dark for now truths, he should lose his grip of the old truths: "the last stale of that, man is worse than the first." And the world helongs to the men who, whatever thev think, start their trains to the tick of the clock and go to press every morning on time, and in the sons of the women who, even though their hearts may be breaking, give the exact dose at the exact moment, and never keep their husbands waiting for meals.

And the women's share ! Well, dear ladies, it, doesn't matter much who owns the world since to you is the profit and the harvest of it. Take from man his whisky and his tobacco, and v. hat has he left? liven of these things woman takes a share. When these vices are abolished, by Act of Parliament supporting the grace of Cod, the world will be exactly as it ought to be, and woman will enter into full possession of her kingdom. Meanwhile, let her only have he meals on time and her sons will tell their wives that the neighbours set their clocks by her diuaer-ljeil..