Who is so rich in happiness as to have any to throw away? We are beggars rather than choosers in that commodity. And Time, who is represented with his hourglass for measuring, his scythe for destruction, his forelock for the grasp of the vigilant, except for his title of Father Time, has been given no symbol definitely pointing to that kindness of his as of a good shepherd, that medicinal touch as of a wise physician, that curious untangling of tangled skeins as of a patient weaver, that solution of improbable equations as of a profound algebraist. But yet a little while, and let the winds freshen the air and the waters go their clean rounds again, and lo! he has shepherded us home from the desert, and comforted us in new garments, and turned our minus into plus by a judicious shifting across the equation. Shall we not give him his crook, his medicine case and license to practise, his loom, his stylus and tablets, and by oracle declare him “the Wisest,” and build him a temple, and consult his auspices, and be no more petulant if he nurtures other seeds than those of our planting, the slow, old-fashioned, silent gardener? We know no oracle but Time, yet we are always harking after another. He is a fluent, dusky, imperturbable person, resembling the Muscadine River. He goes on forever, and yet remains. His answers are Delphic and ambiguous. Alas! he tends to drown enthusiasm. Who is the wisest? “The one who knows that he knows nothing,” quoth your cynic oracle. What is justice? “A solemn lady, but with so bandaged eyes that she cannot see the impish capers of her scales.” What is happiness? As to that he answers more kindly. “In the main,” he says, “happiness is a hardy perennial.” The “observer of decades,” who came to Port Argent some years later, found it proud of its parks, its boulevard, and railroad stations, its new court house, and jail, and manual training school; proud of its rapid growth, and indignant at the inadequacy of the national census. He was shown the new streets, and driven through suburbs where lately pasture and cornfields had been. He found Port Argent still in the main electric, ungainly, and full of growing pains, its problem of municipal government still inaccurately solved, the system not so satisfactory a structure as the railroad bridge below the boathouses, built by Dick Hennion for the North Shore Railroad. In shop and street and office the tide of its life was pouring on, and its citizens held singular language. Its sparrows were twittering in the maples, bustling, quarrelling, yet not permanently interested in either the sins or the wrongs of their neighbours, but going tolerantly to sleep at night. Here and there a bluebird was singing apart its plaintive, unfinished “Lulu-lu.”