es that were not wanted, and of compliments that might have
overflattered the vanity of a savage. He looked backward and forward
from Miss Milroy to Allan, and declared jocosely that he understood now
why his friend's morning walks were always taken in the same direction.
He asked her questions about her mother, and cut short the answers she
gave him by remarks on the weather. In one breath, he said she must
feel the day insufferably hot, and in another he protested that he quite
envied her in her cool muslin dress.

The major came in.

Before he could say two words, Midwinter overwhelmed him with the same
frenzy of familiarity, and the same feverish fluency of speech. He
expressed his interest in Mrs. Milroy's health in terms which would have
been exaggerated on the lips of a friend of the family. He overflowed
into a perfect flood of apologies for disturbing the major at his
mechanical pursuits. He quoted Allan's extravagant account of the clock,
and expressed his own anxiety to see it in terms more extravagant
still. He paraded his superficial book knowledge of the great clock
at Strasbourg, with far-fetched jests on the extraordinary automaton
figures which that clock puts in motion--on the procession of the Twelve
Apostles, which walks out under the dial at noon, and on the toy cock,
which crows at St. Peter's appearance--and this before a man who had
studied every wheel in that complex machinery, and who had passed whole
years of his life in trying to imitate it. "I hear you have outnumbered
the Strasbourg apostles, and outcrowed the Strasbourg cock," he
exclaimed, with the tone and manner of a friend habitually privileged
to waive all ceremony; "and I am dying, absolutely dying, major, to see
your wonderful clock!"

Major Milroy had entered the room with his mind absorbed in his own
mechanical contrivances as usual. But the sudden shock of Midwinter's
familiarity was violent enough to recall him instantly to himself, and
to make him master again, for the time, of his social resources as a man
of the world.

"Excuse me for interrupting you," he said, stopping Midwinter for the
moment, by a look of steady surprise. "I happen to have seen the clock
at Strasbourg; and it sounds almost absurd in my ears (if you will
pardon me for saying so) to put my little experiment in any light of
comparison with that wonderful achievement. There is nothing else of
the kind like it in the world!" He paused, to control his own m