In other rooms men crouched over a revolving hand covered with money, picking out any badly coloured coin as the constant stream advanced towards them. The next department was a mechanical weighing-room, in which wise-looking machines in glass cases put true coins in one slot, light ones in a second, and heavy-weights in a third. As a climax I saw a giant machine that counts half-crowns into one hundred pound bags and never makes a mistake. I watched it count forty bagsful and then walked thoughtfully away. * * * "What does it feel like to make money all day long and draw a few pounds on Friday?" I asked a Mint worker. "Oh, I dunno," he replied as he shook a thousand pounds through a bran sieve. This is a merciful frame of mind. Where Time Stands Still London is full of antique shops--places where Chinese Buddhas gaze pointedly at the alleged work of Chippendale--but if you asked me which is the most remarkable of all I would take you to a shop which deals only in articles more than a thousand years old. When you enter, the centuries drop away like sand in an hour-glass. Through the frosted opacity of the door you are dimly aware of the red blur of a passing omnibus, of shadows that are men and women busying about their day's work. You hear the sound that is London; but it means nothing in here. How can it? It is a fluid unimportance called To-day and you are surrounded by Yesterday. The Present and the Future are intangible things. The Past only can be grasped and loved. That, at least, is how they think in this queer shop where Time is regarded as a mere convention; a shoreless ocean in which each man's life is just a spoonful taken and returned. The men who wander in look mostly dull and dry, sunk in whiskers and absent-mindedness. They sometimes leave their umbrellas in the rack and say "yes" when they should have said "no." They often remark on the wonderful weather when it is pouring with rain. They are probably thinking, you see, of some Grecian dawn or the raising of the siege of Troy. When you know them, and can pull them out of the Past a little, you realize that there is nothing more human on earth than the average archæologist, because he has learned that human men and women have always been much the same, and that a little thing like two thousand years and a pair of spats makes no real difference to human nature, its passions, its frailties, and its frequent glories. In their packed minds Thebes, Athens, Rome, London, Paris, and New York, march shoulder to shoulder with nothing to distinguish them, except, perhaps, a red omnibus going to Victoria. It is so delightful to hear them talk about Jason as if he threw up work in Threadneedle Street to go out to Australia in search of fleeces; and once an old man told me about the marriage of his grand-daughter with such remote charm that it was three days before I realized that he had not been talking about Cupid and Psyche. * * *