had just bought a clock--"picked
it up in Essex," was the way he described the transaction. Buggles is
always going about "picking up" things. He will stand before an old
carved bedstead, weighing about three tons, and say:

"Yes--pretty little thing! I picked it up in Holland;" as though he had
found it by the roadside, and slipped it into his umbrella when nobody
was looking!

Buggles was rather full of this clock. It was of the good old-fashioned
"grandfather" type. It stood eight feet high, in a carved-oak case, and
had a deep, sonorous, solemn tick, that made a pleasant accompaniment to
the after-dinner chat, and seemed to fill the room with an air of homely
dignity.

We discussed the clock, and Buggles said how he loved the sound of its
slow, grave tick; and how, when all the house was still, and he and
it were sitting up alone together, it seemed like some wise old friend
talking to him, and telling him about the old days and the old ways of
thought, and the old life and the old people.

The clock impressed my wife very much. She was very thoughtful all the
way home, and, as we went upstairs to our flat, she said, "Why could not
we have a clock like that?" She said it would seem like having some one
in the house to take care of us all--she should fancy it was looking
after baby!

I have a man in Northamptonshire from whom I buy old furniture now and
then, and to him I applied. He answered by return to say that he had got
exactly the very thing I wanted. (He always has. I am very lucky in this
respect.) It was the quaintest and most old-fashioned clock he had
come across for a long while, and he enclosed photograph and full
particulars; should he send it up?

From the photograph and the particulars, it seemed, as he said, the very
thing, and I told him, "Yes; send it up at once."

Three days afterward, there came a knock at the door--there had been
other knocks at the door before this, of course; but I am dealing
merely with the history of the clock. The girl said a couple of men were
outside, and wanted to see me, and I went to them.

I found they were Pickford's carriers, and glancing at the way-bill, I
saw that it was my clock that they had brought, and I said, airily, "Oh,
yes, it's quite right; bring it up!"

They said they were very sorry, but that was just the difficulty. They
could not get it up.

I went down with them, and wedged securely across the second landing
of the staircase, I found a