appened to look at my old silver chronometer of
_Boreal_-days, which I have kept carefully wound--and how I can be still
thrown into these sudden frantic agitations by a nothing, a nothing, my
good God! I do not know. This time it was only the simple fact that the
hands chanced to point to 3.10 P.M., the precise moment at which all the
clocks of London had stopped--for each town has its thousand weird
fore-fingers, pointing, pointing still, to the moment of doom. In London
it was 3.10 on a Sunday afternoon. I first noticed it going up the river
on the face of the 'Big Ben' of the Parliament-house, and I now find
that they all, all, have this 3.10 mania, time-keepers still, but
keepers of the end of Time, fixedly noting for ever and ever that one
moment. The cloud-mass of fine penetrating _scoriae_ must have instantly
stopped their works, and they had fallen silent with man. But in their
insistence upon this particular minute I had found something so
hideously solemn, yet mock-solemn, personal, and as it were addressed to
_me_, that when my own watch dared to point to the same moment, I was
thrown into one of those sudden, paroxysmal, panting turmoils of mind,
half rage, half horror, which have hardly once visited me since I left
the _Boreal_. On the morrow, alas, another awaited me; and again on the
second morrow after.

* * * * *

My train was execrably slow, and not until after five did I arrive at
the entrance-gates of the Woolwich Royal Arsenal; and seeing that it was
too late to work, I uncoupled the motor, and leaving the others there,
turned back; but overtaken by lassitude, I procured candles, stopped at
the Greenwich Observatory, and in that old dark pile, remained for the
night, listening to a furious storm. But, a-stir by eight the next
morning, I got back by ten to the Arsenal, and proceeded to analyse that
vast and multiple entity. Many parts of it seemed to have been abandoned
in undisciplined haste, and in the Cap Factory, which I first entered, I
found tools by which to effect entry into any desired part. My first
search was for time-fuses of good type, of which I needed two or three
thousand, and after a wearily long time found a great number
symmetrically arranged in rows in a range of buildings called the
Ordnance Store Department. I then descended, walked back to the wharf,
brought up my train, and began to lower the fuses in bag-fulls by ropes
through a shoot, letting