The season is at hand when Time throws his annual challenge in our teeth. The bell tinkles peremptorily and a calendar is thrust upon us. November is still young when we are dragged upon the threshold of another year. The leisurely dismissal of the old year is no longer possible; we may indulge in no lingering good-bye, but the old fellow hustles out in haste, with apologetic, shrinking step and we slam the door upon him. It is off with the old love and on with the new, whether we will or no. I solemnly protest against the invasion of the calendar. In an age that boasts of freedom, I rebel against a tyrant who comes merely to warn us of the fugitive character of Time; for that sharp elbow in the ribs has prodded many a noble soul to his death. These pretty devices that we are asked to hang upon our walls are the seductive advertisements of an insinuating and implacable foe. We are asked to be _particeps criminis_ in his hideous trade, for must I not tear off and cast as rubbish to the void a day, a week, a month, that I may not have done with at all? Why, may I ask, should I throw my yesterdays into the waste-basket? Yet if I fail, falling only a few leaves behind, is not my shameless inefficiency and heedlessness paraded before the world? How often have I delivered myself up to my enemies by suffering April to laugh her girlish laughter through torrid July? I know well the insinuating smile of the friend who, dropping in on a peaceful morning, when Time, as far as I am concerned, has paused in the hay-field to dream upon his scythe handle, walks coolly to the calendar and brings me up to date with a fine air of rebuke, as though he were conferring the greatest favor in the world. I am sure that I should have no standing with my neighbors if they knew that I rarely wind my watch and that the clocks in my house, save one or two that are kept going merely to avoid explanations, are never wound. There is a gentle irony in the fact that the most insolent dispensers of calendars are the life insurance companies. It is a legitimate part of their nefarious game: you and I are their natural prey, and if they can accent for us the mortality of the flesh by holding up before us, in compact form, the slight round of the year, they are doing much to impress upon us the appalling brevity of our most reasonable expectancy. How weak we are to suffer the intimidation of these soulless corporations, who thrust their wares upon us as much as to say, “Here’s a new year, and you’d better make the most of it, for there’s no saying when you will get another.” You, my friend, with your combined calendar and memorandum always before you, may pledge all your to-morrows if you will; but as for me the Hypocritic Days, the Barefoot Dervishes, may ring my bell until they exhaust the battery without gaining a single hour as my grudging alms.