“Willy’s a stout young thing,” I asserted, “with years of life before him.”

“Perhaps,” he returned doubtfully.  A gleam of rare fun lit up his pale, vague eyes.  “Can’t you see him dodging past Saint Peter through the pearly gates” ("I was brought up a Methodist,” he added in apologetic explanation), “trotting along the alabaster streets sniffing about for her among all the Shining Ones, listening for her voice amid the sound of the harps, and when he finds her, hallelujahing with that little bark that was for her alone:  ’Here I am, mistress!  Here I am!  And he’s coming soon, mistress.  Your Old Boy is coming soon.’”

When I retailed that conversation to the Little Red Doctor, he snorted and said that Stepfather Time was one degree crazier than Willy Woolly and that I wasn’t much better than a higher moron myself.  Well, if I’ve got to be called a fool by my best friends, I’d rather be called it in Greek than in English.  It’s more euphonious.

* * * * *

The pair in Number 37 soon settled down to a routine life.  Every morning Stepfather Time got out his big pushcart and set forth in search of treasure, accompanied by Willy Woolly.  Sometimes the dog trotted beneath the cart; sometimes he rode in it.  He was always on the job.  Never did he indulge in those divagations so dear to the normal canine heart.  Other dogs and their ways interested him not.  Cats simply did not exist in his circumscribed life.  Even to the shining mark of a boy on a bicycle he was indifferent, and when a dog has reached that stage one may safely say of him that he has renounced the world and all its vanities.  Willy Woolly’s one concern in life was his master and their joint business.

Soon they became accepted familiars of Our Square.  Despite the general conviction that they were slightly touched, we even became proud of them.  They lent distinction to the locality by getting written up in a Sunday supplement, Willy Woolly being specially photographed therefor, a gleam of transient glory, which, however it may have gratified our local pride, left both of the subjects quite indifferent.  Stepfather Time might have paid more heed to it had he not, at the time, been wholly preoccupied in a difficult quest.

In a basement window, far over on Avenue D, stood an old and battered timepiece of which Stepfather Time had heard the voice but never seen the face.  Each of three attempts to investigate with a view to negotiations had been frustrated by a crabbed and violent-looking man with a repellent club.  Nevertheless, the voice alone had ensnared the connoisseur; it was, by the test of the pipe which he carried on all his quests, D in alt, and would thus complete the major chord of a chime which he had long been building up. (She had loved, best of all, harmonic combinations of the clock bells.) Every day he would halt in front of the place and wait to hear it strike, and its owner would peer out from behind it and shake a wasted fist and curse him with strange, hoarse foreign oaths, while Willy Woolly tugged at his trouser leg and urged him to pass on from that unchancy spot.  All that he could learn about the basement dweller was that his name was Lukisch and he owed for his rent.