Away yonder on the borders of night, dim and gloomy, looms his ancient keep. I wait. Soon on the deepened dusk spread his soft wings, out over the meadow he sails, up over my wooded height, over my moat, to my turret tall, as silent and unseen as the soul of a shadow, except he drift across the face of the full round moon, or with his weird cry cause the dreaming quiet to stir in its sleep and moan. Yes, yes, but one must be pretty much of a child, with most of his childish things not yet put away, to get any such romance out of a rotten apple tree, plus a bunch of feathers no bigger than one’s two fists. One must be pretty far removed from the real world, the live world that swings, no longer through the heavens, but at the distributing end of a news wire--pretty far removed to spend one’s precious time watching screech-owls. And so one is, indeed,--sixteen miles removed by space, one whole day by post, one whole hour by engine and horse, one whole half-minute by the telephone in the back hall. Lost! cut off completely! hopelessly marooned! I fear so. Perhaps I must admit that the watching of owls is for babes and sucklings, not for men with great work to do, that is, with money to make, news to get, office to hold, and clubs to address. For babes and sucklings, and, possibly, for those with a soul to save, yet I hasten to avow that the watching of owls is not religion; for I entirely agree with our Shelburne essayist when he finds, “in all this worship of nature,”--by Traherne, Rousseau, Wordsworth, Thoreau, and those who seek the transfigured world of the woods,--“there is a strain of illusion which melts away at the touch of the greater realities ... and there are evils against which its seduction is of no avail.” But let the illusion melt. Other worships have shown a strain of illusion at times, and against certain evils been of small avail. And let it be admitted that calling regularly at an old apple tree is far short of a full man’s work in the world, even when such calling falls outside of his shop or office-hours. For there are no such hours. The business of life allows no spare time any more. One cannot get rich nowadays in office-hours, nor become great, nor keep telegraphically informed, nor do his share of talking and listening. Everybody but the plumber and paper-hanger works overtime. How the earth keeps up a necessary amount of whirling in the old twenty-four-hour limit is more than we can understand. But she can’t keep up the pace much longer. She must have an extra hour. And how to snatch it from the tail-end of eternity is the burning cosmological question. And this is the burning question with regard to our individual whirling--How to add time, or, what amounts to exactly the same, How to increase the whirling.