And perhaps a not altogether false little story could be written about a man who never visited those most dear to him, because it panged him so to say good-bye when he had to leave.

A LETTER TO FATHER TIME

(NEW YEAR’S EVE)

Dear Father Time—­This is your night of triumph, and it seems only fair to pay you a little tribute.  Some people, in a noble mood of bravado, consider New Year’s Eve an occasion of festivity.  Long, long in advance they reserve a table at their favorite cafe; and becomingly habited in boiled shirts or gowns of the lowest visibility, and well armed with a commodity which is said to be synonymous with yourself—­money—­they seek to outwit you by crowding a month of merriment into half a dozen hours.  Yet their victory is brief and fallacious, for if hours spin too fast by night they will move grindingly on the axle the next morning.  None of us can beat you in the end.  Even the hat-check boy grows old, becomes gray and dies at last babbling of greenbacks.

To my own taste, old Time, it is more agreeable to make this evening a season of gruesome brooding.  Morosely I survey the faults and follies of my last year.  I am grown too canny to pour the new wine of good resolution into the old bottles of my imperfect humors.  But I get a certain grim satisfaction in thinking how we all—­every human being of us—­share alike in bondage to your oppression.  There is the only true and complete democracy, the only absolute brotherhood of man.  The great ones of the earth—­Charley Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks, General Pershing and Miss Amy Lowell—­all these are in service to the same tyranny.  Day after day slips or jolts past, joins the Great Majority; suddenly we wake with a start to find that the best of it is gone by.  Surely it seems but a day ago that Stevenson set out to write a little book that was to be called “Life at Twenty-five”—­before he got it written he was long past the delectable age—­and now we rub our eyes and see he has been dead longer than the span of life he then so delightfully contemplated.  If there is one meditation common to every adult on this globe it is this, so variously phrased, “Well, bo, Time sure does hustle.”

Some of them have scurvily entreated you, old Time!  The thief of youth, they have called you; a highwayman, a gipsy, a grim reaper.  It seems a little unfair.  For you have your kindly moods, too.  Without your gentle passage where were Memory, the sweetest of lesser pleasures?  You are the only medicine for many a woe, many a sore heart.  And surely you have a right to reap where you alone have sown?  Our strength, our wit, our comeliness, all those virtues and graces that you pilfer with such gentle hand, did you not give them to us in the first place?  Give, do I say?  Nay, we knew, even as we clutched them, they were but a loan.  And the great immortality of the race endures, for every day that we see taken away from ourselves we see added to our children or our grandchildren.  It was Shakespeare, who thought a great deal about you, who put it best: