Democratic Sentinel, Volume 12, Number 1, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 January 1888 — THE WEIGHT OF YEARS. [ARTICLE]

THE WEIGHT OF YEARS.

-How Father Time Beguile* Young Lives. In boyhood I was entertained ‘by the story of the “Arabian Nights.” My sympathies were roused by the plight of Sinbad, the sailor, going about with rthe Old Man of the Sea on his shoulders. * I did not allegorize. I did not I had no new wine for old .bottles. I knew Sinbad only as a sailor and the wrinkled old man only as one who had been a stroller on his own limbs till he found portage in Sinbad. I wondered why Sinbad took him. I thought the old man must have said: “You see I am in a helpless plight You see how old, withered, and weazen I iam. lam very light I have wandered along this shore so long there is nothing left of me but a shriveled skin over rickety bones. Let me sit on your shoulder just a little while. lam so light you will hardly feel me, and you have only to tell me when you are tired and I will dismount.” The silly sailor heard and yielded. The wily old man climbed up, locked his legs firmly around Sinbad’s breast and stuck thereto the end of his life. i All “which thing,” as Paul would say-, is an allegory. Sinbad is not a man, :but Man. The Old Man of the Sea is not time-wrinkled, but Time. He is past time. He is the Past. He comes toman and says: “I am very old. I have marked the tides on the shores of this island in the sea of worlds till other worlds have grown dim with age. This scythe wherewith I clip the generations has mown down such myriad lives as to make the crust of the globe iimpact of their skeletons. The world was growing old when I passed before the cradle of humanity. I made record of the faltering steps of infant man. I knew him when he knew not me. I knew of him when he conceived of me as something ‘cut off’ and called me ‘time,’ that is a thing cut. In the very life-stuff of the race I recorded the tattooing of the mind with superstition. Take me on your shoulder. I will iguide your feet. I will, sit lightly." , Man heard and yielded, and the Old Man mounted and locked his limbs .around our breast and laid his hand on lour brain. And there he sits, bestriding us as the Old Man of the Sea bestrode Sinbad. In his left hand he carries the ripe sheaves of error; in his right the seeds of truth. Shake him off we cannot. How he clings to us in the very names we give him! Why do we divide a day into twenty-four Lours and an hour into sixty minutes ? jit is because, long ago, shepherds on the plains of Babylonia happened to divide the day into twenty-four parts and one of these into sixty. It is because Nebuchadnezzar happened to [adopt the time scale of the shepherds. It is because Hipparchus journeying to I. Babylon found and took to Athens the time divisions of the Chaldeans. From Babylon it journeyed to Athens, from to Rome, from Rome to the (World, from the world of Rome down ithe ages till its footprints are on the face of your watch. The Old Man iguides your hand when you paint the numbers on the dial of a clock. Why is our notation decimal ? It is because nature, having wrought indefinitely as to arithmetic, came to the number live for the digits on a mammal’s foot, a number which she held and passed up into the fingers of a man. The first men counted on their fingers, and because the bathmodon which preceded man on his line had five toes our notation is decimal. The Old Man lays his hand on your brain when you stamp your coin or your paper in denominations of ten. How he presses on the brain of the pugilist, who calls his fist “a bunch of fives,” the very name used by Hesiod in the dawn of the mind life of Greece! Why do wear the marriage ring ? It is because the shaggy man of the prime wooed his wife with a club and led her to his cave with a rope on her wrist. When the age of iron came the thing was passing irrto a symbol. The tie of the rope gave place to a ring of iron. The symbolism passed from the wrist to the finger, from iron to gold, but Still, in parts of Germany, the bride, for a time, must wear iron. How lightly the Old Man sits on a lady’s finger whispering servitude where a man had whispered love. —Youth’s Companion.