e end of our joys, and moved
with funereal slowness through the appointed times of our sorrow. They
ruled every season, pervaded every day, recorded every hour, and, like
misers hoarding a treasure, doled out our birthright of leisure second
by second; so that, being rich, we were always impoverished; inheritors
of vast fortune, we were put off with a meagre income; born free, we
were servants of masters who neither ate nor slept, that they might
never for a second surrender their overseership.

There are no clocks in Arden; the sun bestows the day, and no
impertinence of men destroys its charm by calculating its value and
marking it with a price. The only computers of time are the great
trees whose shadows register the unbroken march of light from east to
west. Even the days and nights lost that painful distinctness which
they had for us when they gave us a constant sense of loss, an
incessant apprehension of change and age. Their shining procession
leaves no such records in Arden; they come like the waves whose
ceaseless flow sings of the boundless sea whence they come. They bring
no consciousness of ebbing years and joys and strength; they bring
rather a sense of eternal resource and beneficence. In Arden one never
feels in haste; there is always time enough and to spare; in fact, the
word "time" is never used in the vernacular of the Forest except when
reference is made to the enslaved world without. There were moments at
the beginning when we felt a little bewildered by our freedom, and I
think Rosalind secretly longed for the familiar tones of the cuckoo
clock which had chimed so many years in and out for us in the old days.
One must get accustomed even to good fortune, and after one has been
confined within the narrow limits of a little plot of earth the
possession of a continent confuses and perplexes. But men are born to
good fortune if they but knew it, and we were soon reconciled to the
possession of inexhaustible wealth. We felt the delight of a sudden
exchange of poverty for richness, a swift transition from bondage to
freedom. Eternity was ours, and we ceased to divide it into fragments,
or to set it off into duties and work. We lived in the consciousness
of a vast leisure; a quiet happiness took the place of the old anxiety
to always do at the moment the thing that ought to be done; we accepted
the days as gifts of joy rather than as bringers of care.

It was delightful to fall asleep lulled b