Minutes

“ When he recovers his senses, the hand of the clock has moved on ten minutes. Torn by fears and suspense, he listens with all his ears. He hears faint movements on the floor above. The minutes pass; twenty minutes pass. ”

“ I wasted time, and now doth time waste me;
For now hath time made me his numb’ring clock.
My thoughts are minutes, and with sighs they jar
Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch,
Whereto my finger, like a dial’s point,
Is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears.
Now, sir, the sound that tells what hour it is
Are clamorous groans which strike upon my heart,
Which is the bell. So sighs and tears and groans
Show minutes, times, and hours. ”

“ But in the last week all the thoughts, the plans, the ambitions, the discoveries of a new future, seem to be concentrated. The minutes drag by with a laborious and torpid slowness, and there is an intensity of time which seems to crowd sixty hours into one single hour by the clock. ”

“ To measure time by the state of our feelings would be as futile as an attempt to measure space by the slowness or impetuosity of our movements. Hours dwindle into minutes, and minutes are exaggerated into hours, according to the circumstances under which the mind moves on. ”

“ The day passed. To how many excited and impatient people it seemed to contain more than twenty-four hours! And each hour held far more than sixty minutes! There came no answer, no letter, no telegram! ”

“ No human being ever spoke of scenery for above two minutes at a time, which makes me suspect we hear too much of it in literature. ”

“ I never leave my house without ascertaining the exact number of minutes in the day, and take care that my watch is exact to the time, for a minute more or less would make all the difference in the world. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ And, on the other hand, if you set a clock forward even so little as ten minutes, you take away that much from the future, and you make the coming hour only fifty minutes long. Now, no human being has a right to take anything away from the future, or to make the hours shorter than they were intended to be. I desire, my dear niece, that you will earnestly think over what I have said, and I am sure that you will then see for yourself how unwise it would be to trifle with the length of the hours which make up our day. And now, Arla, let us talk of other things. ”

“ It was impossible to judge the flight of time. I measured five minutes by counting my pulse, allowing seventy-two beats to the minute. But it took eternities, and toward the last I found it hard to count ”

“ But what minutes! Count them by sensation and not by calendars, and each moment is a day and the race a life. ”

“ The little American clock on the mantel ticked and ticked, but the hands lagged, for he had not been occupied five minutes in all. He went up to the mantel and watched the hands of the clock. A minute—longer than a year to him—crept by. ”

“ Five minutes of today are worth as much to me, as five minutes in the next millennium. Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today. ”

“ 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 ”

“ One hundred and twenty minutes. Anything might be done in that time. Anything. Nothing. Oh, he had had hundreds of hours, and what had he done with them? Wasted them, spilt the precious minutes as though his reservoir were inexhaustible. ”

“ Let one of my little readers remark the length of five minutes when she or he, as the case may be, is busy and interested, and five minutes when they are standing idle, wondering what they shall do next, or perhaps grumbling because they are prevented doing something on which they had set their heart. Once a very small child, who was told to wait ten minutes for some reason, was seen to give the clock a great push and call it "a stupid, tiresome thing"—she was quite sure it had stopped just to tease her. ”

“ Further, the men who got up this scheme said that every day should have not only the same length, but that it should have 24 hours, and of course you know that hours are divided into minutes and minutes into seconds. ”

“ Many exercises may be devised by the teacher besides these here given.
Show The Pupils That:
The minute hand counts all the minutes while the hour hand goes from one hour to another.
The minute hand goes twelve times as fast as the hour hand.
The minute hand counts twelve minutes while the hour hand is going past one minute.
Exercise V.
Play it is dinner time, and the two hands are home together again, but they cannot stop, for it is their duty to always keep going. ”

“ Here an inch and a mile are chosen as our standards. In like manner, we speak of so many seconds, or minutes, or hours, or days, or years, choosing that standard of time or duration which is most convenient for our purpose. ”

“ Minutes, hours, days, and years are, then, no more Minutes, Hours, Days, and Years not necessary Measures of duration, necessary to time or duration, than inches, feet, yards, and miles, marked out in any matter, are to extension. For, though we in this part of the universe, by the constant use of them, as of periods set out by the revolutions of the sun, or as known parts of such periods, have fixed the ideas of such lengths of duration in our minds, which we apply to all parts of time whose lengths we would consider ”

“ THE COW AND HER CALF.
MINUTES.
WE are but minutes—little things!
Each one furnished with sixty wings,
With which we fly on our unseen track,
And not a minute ever comes back.
We are but minutes; use, use us well,
For how we are used we must one day tell.
Who uses minutes has hours to use;
Who loses minutes whole years must lose.
[Pg 198]
GOING FOR THE LETTERS. AN AUSTRALIAN STORY.
IT was a bitter cold day in the end of the month of January. The morning had been a very unpleasant one—neither frost nor snow, a sort of compound of rain and sleet ”

“ Well—we do forget things sometimes, all of us do,” the farmer’s wife said comfortingly as she went to look at the clock. “Twenty minutes to seven, our clock says. It’s apt to be fast, so I guess you won’t miss any trains. Father he says he’d rather have a clock fast than slow any day, but it don’t often get more than ten minutes wrong either way.”
And to us, after our two weeks of camp, [pg 161] ten minutes’ error in a clock seemed indeed slight.
“Jonathan,” I said, as we walked back along the road, “I hate to go back to clock time. I like real time better.” ”

“ It's astonishing what a lot of odd minutes one can catch during the day, if one really sets about it. ”

“ The units of duration, on the other hand, which the time-sense is able to take in at a single stroke, are groups of a few seconds, and within these units very few subdivisions—perhaps forty at most, as we shall presently see—can be clearly discerned. The durations we have practically most to deal with—minutes, hours, and days—have to be symbolically conceived, and constructed by mental addition, after the fashion of those extents of hundreds of miles and upward, which in the field of space are beyond the range of most men's practical interests altogether. ”

“ If we were to calculate in round numbers the amount of time saved by this rush to get away from the shop, we should find three minutes, probably the maximum—and if we balance that against the loss to body and mind which is incurred, we should find the three minutes' gain quite overweighted by the loss of many hours, perhaps days, because of the illness which must be the result of such habitual contraction. ”

“ Why, I saw in a very old newspaper in the Museum lately, that an athlete could once run a mile on the cinder path in four minutes seventeen seconds; and it can't be done now by a champion under twenty-five minutes! Halloa! here's the carrier brought that curious old water-clock I bought at the antiquity shop yesterday.... You see those faint lines inside? They were to mark the hours—hours, though—no! I'm sure the water would never drip through that little hole fast enough to sink one of those measurements in an hour. Let's try.... Halloa! While I've been talking it's got to one o'clock a.m. ”

“ Again, what two days will be 13 hours, 30 minutes long each? Turn the director to 45 minutes after six Westward, and move it and the the Horizon together, till some point in the Ecliptic exactly intersects them both, and it points out September 1st. for one of the days; and, when brought to 15 minutes past 5, in the morning hours, or Eastern side of the Meridian, the director points out April 10th. for the other. ”

“ That gives them a chance of doing something." He seemed surprised that I had not brought an unfinished drawing. The minute hand of the clock had fallen over two minute marks, as they sometimes do on their downward course from three to four, and it was fast approaching four, which was the limit of the twenty minutes. We talked on, but the next time I looked at the clock I became confused, for the hour and the minute hand had merged into one, and after that I could not tell one from the other. ”

“ A difference of thirty minutes in your dinner hour marks a difference in your social scale. 'There isn't time,' you sigh, submissively, when you give up something you'd like to do. Time is money, time presses, give me time, are some of your phrases. ”

“ At first the sittings should not be of longer duration than fifteen minutes, but it is important they should take place regularly, every day if possible, and always at the same hour and in the same place. ”

“ Every sixty-five or seventy minutes, never varying more than five minutes, day and night, in all seasons and every kind of weather, “Old Faithful” has steadily performed his task since first discovered in 1870 until the present time, and no man can tell for how many centuries before. ”

“ Although the minute hand of our electric watches moves almost imperceptibly, marking minutes, hours, days, and years, it advances in measured, limited progression; whereas the effects of suffering on the child go on advancing in an increasing—nay, multiplying—ratio, by which, up to a certain point, that of geometrical progression is far exceeded. ”

“ If a third follow your example, that makes a quarter of an hour. Now, there are about a hundred and eighty of us here; and if every one wasted five minutes in a day, what would it come to? Let me see. ”

“ I recommend to you to take care of the minutes; for hours will take care of themselves. I am very sure, that many people lose two or three hours every day, by not taking care of the minutes. Never think any portion of time whatsoever too short to be employed ”

“ Time and Manner.—The time limit of a call is fifteen or twenty minutes, not to exceed the latter. This is the protection society affords us from bores. We can endure even the most tiresome of visitors for fifteen minutes. ”

“ Either you will count twenty-four hours on the clock, or you will stay through all the light of one day, and all the darkness of one night. That is, you will count time either by the Clock or by the Sun.
Now we say that there are 365 days in the year. But there are really a few odd hours and minutes and seconds into the bargain. The reason of this is that the Sun does not go by the Clock in making the days and nights. Sometimes he spends rather more than twenty-four hours by the Clock over a day and night; sometimes he takes less. ”

“ Approximately twenty minutes have passed; it is a clear morning; the sun should now have hit the top several stories of the Insurance Building.”
But it had not. It was a clear morning, but the dawn had not brightened at all in the twenty minutes. And that big clock still said six. ”

“ Much depends upon when and where you read a book. In the five or six impatient minutes, before the dinner is quite ready, who would think of taking up the Fairy Queen for a stop-gap, or a volume of Bishop Andrewes' sermons? ”

“ For example the absolute time of the moon's periodical revolution would note altered, but being measured by days, that had decreased in length, the period of the moon's revolutions would therefore appear to be longer, and would require an additional number of our minutes or seconds for their movements. ”

“ On the whole, during the year, he uses up more time than the Clock does.
The Clock makes exactly 365 days of 24 hours each. The Sun makes 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, 49 seconds, and a tiny bit besides. ”

“ he that hopes to look back hereafter with satisfaction upon past years, must learn to know the present value of single minutes, and endeavour to let no particle of time fall useless to the ground. ”

“ Everything grew still as death. Slowly and in the midst of this most solemn silence the minutes sped away, and while they sped the full moon passed deeper and deeper into the shadow of the earth, as the inky segment of its circle slid in awful majesty across the lunar craters. The great pale orb seemed to draw near and to grow in size. She turned a coppery hue, then that portion of her surface which was unobscured as yet grew grey and ashen, and at length, as totality approached, her mountains and her plains were to be seen glowing luridly through a crimson gloom. ”