ation common to every
adult on this globe it is this, so variously phrased, "Well, bo, Time
sure does hustle."

Some of them have scurvily entreated you, old Time! The thief of youth,
they have called you; a highwayman, a gipsy, a grim reaper. It seems a
little unfair. For you have your kindly moods, too. Without your gentle
passage where were Memory, the sweetest of lesser pleasures? You are
the only medicine for many a woe, many a sore heart. And surely you have
a right to reap where you alone have sown? Our strength, our wit, our
comeliness, all those virtues and graces that you pilfer with such
gentle hand, did you not give them to us in the first place? Give, do I
say? Nay, we knew, even as we clutched them, they were but a loan. And
the great immortality of the race endures, for every day that we see
taken away from ourselves we see added to our children or our
grandchildren. It was Shakespeare, who thought a great deal about you,
who put it best:

Nativity, once in the main of light,
Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crowned,
Crooked eclipses 'gainst his glory fight
And Time that gave doth now his gift confound--

It is to be hoped, my dear Time, that you have read Shakespeare's
sonnets, because they will teach you a deal about the dignity of your
career, and also suggest to you the only way we have of keeping up with
you. There is no way of outwitting Time, Shakespeare tells his young
friend, "Save breed to brave him when he takes thee hence." Or, as a
poor bungling parodist revamped it:

Pep is the stuff to put Old Time on skids--
Pep in your copy, yes, and lots of kids.

It is true that Shakespeare hints another way of doing you in, which is
to write sonnets as good as his. This way, needless to add, is open to
few.

Well, my dear Time, you are not going to fool me into making myself
ridiculous this New Year's Eve with a lot of bonny but impossible
resolutions. I know that you are playing with me just as a cat plays
with a mouse; yet even the most piteous mousekin sometimes causes his
tormentor surprise or disappointment by getting under a bureau or behind
the stove, where, for the moment, she cannot paw him. Every now and
then, with a little luck, I shall pull off just such a scurry into
temporary immortality. It may come by reading Dickens or by seeing a
sunset, or by lunching with friends, or by forgetting to wind the alarm
clock, or by contemplating the rosy little pate of my dau