He jerked his head slowly round and gazed at the surrounding objects. "It's such an extraordinary world. I can't get used to it at all. One keeps on bumping into things and falling into things--things that ought not to be there, you know." Arthur could hardly control an eager curiosity to know what the thing was, round and shiny, that looked like a sort of halo at the back of the Clockwork man's head. He kept on dodging from one side to the other in an effort to see it clearly. "Are you looking at my clock?" enquired the Clockwork man, without altering his tone of speech. "I must apologise. I feel quite indecent." "But what is it for?" gasped Arthur. "It's the regulating mechanism," said the other, monotonously, "I keep on forgetting that you _can't_ know these things. You see, it controls me. But, of course, it's out of order. That's how I came to be here, in this absurd world. There can't be any other reason, I'm sure." He looked so childishly perplexed that Arthur's sense of pity was again aroused, and he listened in respectful silence. "You see," the mechanical voice went on, "only about half the clock is in action. That accounts for my present situation." There was a pause, broken only by obscure tickings, regular but thin in sound. "I had been feeling very run down, and went to have myself attended to. Then some careless mechanic blundered, and of course I went all wrong." He turned swiftly and looked hard at Arthur. "All wrong. Absolutely all wrong. And of course, I--I--lapsed, you see." "Lapsed!" queried Arthur. "Yes, I lapsed. Slipped, if you like that better--slipped back about eight thousand years, so far as I can make out. And, of course, everything is different." His arms shot up both together in an abrupt gesture of despair. "And now I am confronted with all these old problems of Time and Space." Arthur's recent reflections returned to him, and produced a little glow in his mind. "Is there a world," he questioned, "where the problems of Time and Space are different?" "Of course," replied the Clockwork man, clicking slightly, "quite different. The clock, you see, made man independent of Time and Space. It solved everything." "But what happens," Arthur wanted to know, "when the clock works properly?" "Everything happens," said the other, "exactly as you want it to happen." "Awfully convenient," Arthur murmured. "Exceedingly." The Clockwork man's head nodded up and down with a regular rhythm. "The whole aim of man is convenience." He jerked himself forward a few paces, as though impelled against his will. "But my present situation, you know, is extremely _in_convenient." He waddled swiftly along, and, to Arthur's great disappointment, disappeared round the corner of the hedge, so that it was impossible to get more than a fleeting glimpse of that fascinating object at the back of his head. But he was still speaking. "I don't know what I shall do, I'm sure," Arthur heard him say, as though to himself. VIII