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“I suppose I was the happiest man in the world.”

Any chance incident or remark might turn his thought and speech, unconscious of the transition, from his favorite technicalities back to the past. Some comment of mine upon a specimen of that dismal songster, the cuckoo clock, which stood on his mantel, had started him into one of his learned expositions.

“The first cuckoo clock, as you are doubtless aware, sir”–he was always scrupulous to assume knowledge on the part of his hearer, no matter how abstruse or technical the subject; it was a phase of his inherent courtesy–“was intended to represent not the cuckoo, but the blackbird. It had a double pipe for the hours, ‘Pit-weep! Pit-weep!’ and a single–“

His voice trailed into silence as the mechanical bird of his own collection popped forth and piped its wooden lay. Willy Woolly pattered over, sat down before it, and, gazing through and beyond the meaningless face with eyes of adoration whose purport there was no mistaking, whined lovingly.

“When the cuckoo sounded,” continued the collector without the slightest change of intonation, “she used to imitate it to puzzle Willy Woolly. A merry heart! … All was so still after it stopped beating. The clocks forgot to strike.”

The poodle, turning his absorbed regard from the Presence that moves beyond time and its perishing voices, trotted to his master and nuzzled the frail hand.

The hand fondled him. “Yes, little dog,” murmured the man. His eyes, sad as those of the animal, quested the dimness.

“Why does she come to him and not to me? He loved her dearly, didn’t you, little dog? But not as I did.” There was a quivering note of jealousy in his voice. “Why is my vision blinded to what he sees?”

“You have said yourself that there are finer sensibilities than ours,” I suggested.

He shook his head. “It lies deeper than that. I think he is drawing near her. He used to have a little bark that he kept for her alone. In the dead of night I have heard him give that bark–since. And I knew that she was speaking to him. I think that he will go first. Perhaps he will tell her that I am coming…. But I should be very lonely.”

“Willy’s a stout young thing,” I asserted, “with years of life before him.”

“Perhaps,” he returned doubtfully. A gleam of rare fun lit up his pale, vague eyes. “Can’t you see him dodging past Saint Peter through the pearly gates” (“I was brought up a Methodist,” he added in apologetic explanation), “trotting along the alabaster streets sniffing about for her among all the Shining Ones, listening for her voice amid the sound of the harps, and when he finds her, hallelujahing with that little bark that was for her alone: ‘Here I am, mistress! Here I am! And he’s coming soon, mistress. Your Old Boy is coming soon.'”

When I retailed that conversation to the Little Red Doctor, he snorted and said that Stepfather Time was one degree crazier than Willy Woolly and that I wasn’t much better than a higher moron myself. Well, if I’ve got to be called a fool by my best friends, I’d rather be called it in Greek than in English. It’s more euphonious.

* * * * *

The pair in Number 37 soon settled down to a routine life. Every morning Stepfather Time got out his big pushcart and set forth in search of treasure, accompanied by Willy Woolly. Sometimes the dog trotted beneath the cart; sometimes he rode in it. He was always on the job. Never did he indulge in those divagations so dear to the normal canine heart. Other dogs and their ways interested him not. Cats simply did not exist in his circumscribed life. Even to the shining mark of a boy on a bicycle he was indifferent, and when a dog has reached that stage one may safely say of him that he has renounced the world and all its vanities. Willy Woolly’s one concern in life was his master and their joint business.