hardly
follow him. Then there were pauses in which he seemed lost, and abrupt
changes of subject, as if he could hardly control the order of his
thoughts. And in all the evident strain and anxiety to say everything
that he wished to say to me appeared that morbid fancy of its being
"the last time."

After we had talked for some time he said, "Life goes wonderfully
fast, Regie, though you may not think so just now. I do so well
remember being a child myself. I was eight years old, I think, when I
prayed for money enough to buy a _Fuchsia coccinea_ (they had not been
in England more than ten or twelve years then). My brother gave me
half-a-crown, and I got one. It seems as if that one yonder must be
it. I began a model of my father's house in card-board one winter,
too. Then I got bronchitis, and did not finish it. I have been
intending to finish it ever since, but it lies uncompleted in a box
upstairs. So we purpose and neglect, till death comes like a nurse to
take us to bed, and finds our tasks unfinished, and takes away our
toys!"

Presently he went on: "Our mechanical arbitrary division of time is
indeed a very false one. See how one day drags along, and how quickly
another passes. The true measure of time is that which makes each
man's life a day, his day. The real night is that in which no man can
work. Indeed, nothing can be more true and natural than those Eastern
expressions. I remember things that happened in my childhood as one
remembers what one did this morning. What a lot of things I meant to
do to-day! And one runs out into the garden instead of setting to
work, and it is noon before one knows where he is, and other people
take up one's time, and the afternoon slips away, and a man's day had
need be fifty times its length for him to do all he means and ought to
do, and to run after all the distractions the devil sends him as well.
So comes old age, the evening when one is tired, and it's hard to make
any fresh start; and then we're pretty near the end, at 'the last
feather of the shuttle,' as we say in Yorkshire. I often think that
the pitiful shortness of this life, compared with a man's hopes and
plans, is almost proof enough of itself that there must be another,
better fitted to his aims and capacities. And then--measure the folly
of not securing _that_! And talking of proofs, Regie, and whilst I'm
taking the privilege of this season of your confirmation to proffer a
little advice, above all things