Therefore, what is left for us to do, but to crow? And the best and
greatest of us all, is he who crows the loudest and the longest on
this little dunghill that we call our world!

Well, I was going to tell you about our clock.

It was my wife's idea, getting it, in the first instance. We had been
to dinner at the Buggles', and Buggles had just bought a
clock--"picked it up in Essex," was the way he described the
transaction. Buggles is always going about "picking up" things. He
will stand before an old carved bedstead, weighing about three tons,
and say:

"Yes--pretty little thing! I picked it up in Holland;" as though he
had found it by the roadside, and slipped it into his umbrella when
nobody was looking!

Buggles was rather full of this clock. It was of the good
old-fashioned "grandfather" type. It stood eight feet high, in a
carved-oak case, and had a deep, sonorous, solemn tick, that made a
pleasant accompaniment to the after-dinner chat, and seemed to fill
the room with an air of homely dignity.

We discussed the clock, and Buggles said how he loved the sound of its
slow, grave tick; and how, when all the house was still, and he and it
were sitting up alone together, it seemed like some wise old friend
talking to him, and telling him about the old days and the old ways of
thought, and the old life and the old people.

The clock impressed my wife very much. She was very thoughtful all