Minute Man

“ Had it been possible to suggest any superstition about a man universally popular, people would have said that this henchman of time and minute-hand of diligence drew his power from doubtful sources. Further north, where there was less superstition than amongst these mingled unspiritualized populations, Minuit might have been burnt as a wizard. A little doctor in the Deutsch hills, who once prescribed for the clock-mender, reported that his pulse had a metallic beat, and, looking suddenly up, he saw, where Minuit's face had been, a round clock face looking down and ticking at him. ”

“ About a man who is rich, powerful, and wholly unpopular, hated by the majority, and feared by all, legends grow as quickly as toadstools on a marshy moor. Some were half true, some wholly apocryphal, deliberate, and malicious inventions. True or false, John Minute ignored them all, denying nothing, explaining nothing, and even refusing to take action against a Cape Town weekly which dealt with his career in a spirit of unpardonable frankness. ”

“ Both Silas and I understood that Archie was the one who should act as commander of our small expedition, and we obeyed in silence, the skiff darting ahead once she felt the weight of the wind, as if understanding full well the need of speed.
Not until we were well off Morton's point did either of us venture to break the silence, and then Silas asked suddenly, as if he had been stewing over the matter for some time:
"Why shouldn't there be Minute Boys as well as Minute Men, and why, since we have begun to work for the Cause in good earnest, shouldn't we raise a company?" ”

“ There is no man, firm as his nerves may be, who could retain his courage in this situation.
In twenty minutes the ringing was done. Half of that time passed over me without power of computation,—the other half appeared an age. When it ceased, I became gradually more quiet, but a new fear retained me. I knew that five minutes would elapse without ringing, but, at the end of that short time, the bell would be rung a second time, for five minutes more. I could not calculate time. A minute and an hour were of equal duration. ”

“ Hush, Louisa! Don't let me hear that odious excuse again. Suppose it was only for a minute. Have you any more right to do wrong for a minute than for a day? You are always saying—'only a minute,' 'just a minute,' but your minutes are very apt to lengthen into hours. It was your stopping 'just a minute' when you were sent on an important errand which almost cost the poor little baby its life, last summer. It is your stopping 'just a minute' to read or play or do something else to please yourself, which makes you late at breakfast, at school, and at church ”

“ He calls half-past two thirty-eight o'clock, and in twenty minutes from then he says it is one!
Is it that he really has grown to feel contempt for his master, and wishes to show it? They say no man is a hero to his valet; may it be that even stony-face Time himself is but a short-lived, puny mortal—a little greater than some others, that is all—to the dim eyes of this old servant of his? Has he, ticking, ticking, all these years, come at last to see into the littleness of that Time that looms so great to our awed human eyes? ”

“ There is a minute that is longer than an hour; there is an hour that may be shorter than any minute. Happy are they that have enjoyed this latter. The particular minute that follows on Archibald's retreat seems to contain a whole day-ful of hours, so terrible is its length to the two he leaves behind. ”

“ You read, I will suppose, attentively enough; but you cannot see the speaker's white, sincere face in the bright circle of the little lamp, nor hear the intonation of his voice. You cannot know how his expression followed the turns of his story! Most of us hearers were in shadow, for the candles in the smoking-room had not been lighted, and only the face of the Journalist and the legs of the Silent Man from the knees downward were illuminated. At first we glanced now and again at each other. After a time we ceased to do that, and looked only at the Time Traveller's face. ”

“ From ‘minutus,’ the Latin participle of the verb ‘minuo,’ come the English adjective ‘minúte’ and the noun ‘mínute.’ Properly ‘minuto primo’ was, in Italian, the first division of the hour; ‘minuto secondo’ was the second, and ‘minuto terzo’ the third division; which is, in French, ‘tierce,’ i.e. the sixtieth part of a second. The English word ‘mite’ is only a contraction of minute—it is a minute insect; and a ‘minuet’ is a dance with short steps. ”

“ The problem of hours, minutes, seconds, and fractions of them was something they scarcely dreamed of. Nor did they need to cut their time up into such small parts. Life, as I before remarked, was not very rushing. Nobody expected to meet anybody else at a particular instant in those far-away, lazy, easy-going times, or to go anywhere on the minute. [60] If you arrived at where you were going before the darkness fell that was all even the most ambitious asked. The splitting up of time with our present-day nicety is of comparatively modern working out. ”

“ The minute which is gone can never be recalled, while the next minute is fraught with uncertainty. We are sure—not of this minute, but of this instant only, of time. Then, while we may, let us say the loving word, do the kind act, suppress the unkind remark, encourage those who are struggling by the way—this minute. ”

“ It may have been a minute and a half, or two minutes, or two and a half. It is always hard to judge time, and now it had become all but impossible.
“I am still hungry,” said Charles Vincent, “but it would be foolhardy to wait for service here. Should I help myself? They will not mind if they are dead. And if they are not dead, in any case it seems that I am invisible to them.” ”

“ For if we suppose the time marked to be an hour, the space passed over by the minute hand, that is, the circumference of the dial, has no relation with the hour except what the artificer gave it by so constructing the watch that the minute hand would make one revolution every hour. ”

“ Myers took me by the arm.
"Listen," he said, "and listen good, because I don't have time to say it twice. I've got the sixteen Romans waiting in a trigger area. There's a trip mechanism that will throw them back to their own time the minute there's an opening for them to fit into. I'm going to stay here and operate the machine. I want you to ride the time-grapple back to the Arena and see that the others—you said they were Roundheads?—and nobody but they get into the time-grapple for transference back to their own time." ”

“ The other men were Blank, the Editor afore-mentioned, a certain journalist, and another—a quiet, shy man with a beard—whom I didn't know, and who, as far as my observation went, never opened his mouth all the evening. There was some speculation at the dinner-table about the Time Traveller's absence, and I suggested time travelling, in a half jocular spirit. The Editor wanted that explained to him, and the Psychologist volunteered a wooden account of the "ingenious paradox and trick" we had witnessed that day week. ”

“ But your clock is always five minutes fast, isn't it? You didn't forget your clock is always five minutes fast?"
"No, I did not forget that. Our clock is fast to allow us to clear the house at closing time. But I thought he might be a few minutes too soon."
"He couldn't. He couldn't be a minute too soon. He couldn't be a second too soon. He couldn't be the ten thousandth part of a second too soon."
Williams smiled slightly. "Couldn't be a second too soon, Mr. Leigh! What's a second? Why that!" He tapped his hand on the pewter top of the counter before and after saying the word "that." ”

“ It wants just five minutes of the hour, if I judge the time right."
"No harm can happen from being a little too soon," replied Ralph.
"Sometimes, sir," answered Gaunt Stilling; "many a man has got his bones broken for being half an hour too soon; as, for instance, If a man appoints another to help him in a fray, and gets to his enemy half an hour before his friend, he will have time to take a mighty good drubbing for his lack of punctuality." ”

“ Out again and around the block; anything to kill time until the precious hour should arrive. Lord!—how the minutes dragged. The hands of the old clock of Trinity spire must be stuck together. Any other day it would take him at least half an hour to walk up Wall Street, down Broadway to the Battery and back again—now ten minutes was enough. Would the minute hand never climb up the face to the hour hand and the two get together at twelve, and so end his impatience. He wished now he had telegraphed to Ruth not to expect him until the late afternoon train. ”

“ Is not a day divided into twenty-four hours, each hour into sixty minutes, and every minute sub-divided into sixty seconds? Now in 86,400 seconds very many things can be done.” ”

“ I become absent-minded, as you say. I jump back for a moment. Of course we have no means of staying back for any length of Time, any more than a savage or an animal has of staying six feet above the ground. But a civilised man is better off than the savage in this respect. He can go up against gravitation in a balloon, and why should he not hope that ultimately he may be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the Time-Dimension, or even turn about and travel the other way?”
“Oh, this,” began Filby, “is all—”
“Why not?” said the Time Traveller. ”

“ Reeking with perspiration, aching in every joint, and knowing full well that within a short time we would have all the king's men striving to dislodge us, we Minute Boys did our portion of the work with the men, and it gave me no little pride to see that never one of them shirked, although here and there I could see great hulking farmers throw themselves upon the ground as if it was impossible to remain longer standing. ”

“ Into the manhood of the race: for I, for my own part, cannot think that these latter days of weak experiment, fragmentary theory, and mutual discord are indeed man’s culminating time! I say, for my own part. He, I know—for the question had been discussed among us long before the Time Machine was made—thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilisation only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end. If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so. ”

“ Silas demanded, and Hiram shook his head with the air of one who has come to an end of his budget of news.
"It is only that we are to make some important move mighty soon, and more than that I am in the dark. You can set it down as a fact, however, that this ordering of the Minute Boys to be ready for what looks like special duty, goes to prove that our people are aiming to give General Gage a black eye inside of a short time." ”

“ Because there is no reason why the lives of four Minute Boys be sacrificed. If there is any show of coming upon the lad, I may be able to aid him single-handed, and for all of us to venture into town would be increasing the chances of detection. ”

“ "But you only have to live one minute at a time, Ruth, and any one can endure anything for one minute at a time!" ”

“ Again Pierre and I looked at each other in amazement, and I must also add with no little of disappointment. We had been flattering ourselves that it might be possible for us to play the spy upon the Britishers, and thereby earn much of credit for our [Pg 112] small company of Minute Boys, never for the moment dreaming that there might be others in the village who were playing the same part; but surely not allowing that an old negro, a slave, might be employed in the same work. ”

“ The Journalist tried to relieve the tension by telling anecdotes of Hettie Potter. The Time Traveler devoted his attention to his dinner, and displayed the appetite of a tramp. The Medical Man smoked a cigarette, and watched the Time Traveler through his eyelashes. The Silent Man seemed even more clumsy than usual, and drank champagne with regularity and determination out of sheer nervousness. At last the Time Traveler pushed his plate away, and looked round us. ”

“ If I could have seen the least ray of hope in such an enterprise, none would have been more eager than I; but to my mind there was not one chance in an hundred that we could even succeed in getting into the town, yet a word from Harvey caused me to become as eager as either Archie or Hiram to set about the apparently hopeless attempt.
"If there are but seven of our Minute Boys here in the encampment, it is the duty of those who have come out from the battle unscathed to learn the fate of the others. Who can say that the lobster backs [Pg 214] may not have more than Silas in their clutches?" ”

“ Arthur's recent reflections returned to him, and produced a little glow in his mind. "Is there a world," he questioned, "where the problems of Time and Space are different?"
"Of course," replied the Clockwork man, clicking slightly, "quite different. The clock, you see, made man independent of Time and Space. It solved everything." ”

“ Like the dial with the inscription 'Nulla vestigia retrorsum' each man's steps are taken never to be retraced, the act once done can no more be recalled than the shadow on the dial can go backward. What wonder then that the most thoughtful of men are particularly careful of their time, regulating their use of it with the utmost precision and weighing it out as scrupulously as a miser would his gold? What wonder that they should sigh and grieve over a wasted day, and with bitter self-reproach should say to themselves as Titus did, 'Perdidi diem,'—I have lost a day? ”