Half-way I happened to look at my old silver chronometer of Boreal-days, which I have kept carefully wound—­and how I can be still thrown into these sudden frantic agitations by a nothing, a nothing, my good God!  I do not know.  This time it was only the simple fact that the hands chanced to point to 3.10 P.M., the precise moment at which all the clocks of London had stopped—­for each town has its thousand weird fore-fingers, pointing, pointing still, to the moment of doom.  In London it was 3.10 on a Sunday afternoon.  I first noticed it going up the river on the face of the ‘Big Ben’ of the Parliament-house, and I now find that they all, all, have this 3.10 mania, time-keepers still, but keepers of the end of Time, fixedly noting for ever and ever that one moment.  The cloud-mass of fine penetrating scoriae must have instantly stopped their works, and they had fallen silent with man.  But in their insistence upon this particular minute I had found something so hideously solemn, yet mock-solemn, personal, and as it were addressed to me, that when my own watch dared to point to the same moment, I was thrown into one of those sudden, paroxysmal, panting turmoils of mind, half rage, half horror, which have hardly once visited me since I left the Boreal.  On the morrow, alas, another awaited me; and again on the second morrow after.

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My train was execrably slow, and not until after five did I arrive at the entrance-gates of the Woolwich Royal Arsenal; and seeing that it was too late to work, I uncoupled the motor, and leaving the others there, turned back; but overtaken by lassitude, I procured candles, stopped at the Greenwich Observatory, and in that old dark pile, remained for the night, listening to a furious storm.  But, a-stir by eight the next morning, I got back by ten to the Arsenal, and proceeded to analyse that vast and multiple entity.  Many parts of it seemed to have been abandoned in undisciplined haste, and in the Cap Factory, which I first entered, I found tools by which to effect entry into any desired part.  My first search was for time-fuses of good type, of which I needed two or three thousand, and after a wearily long time found a great number symmetrically arranged in rows in a range of buildings called the Ordnance Store Department.  I then descended, walked back to the wharf, brought up my train, and began to lower the fuses in bag-fulls by ropes through a shoot, letting go each rope as the fuses reached the cart.  However, on winding one fuse, I found that the mechanism would not go, choked with scoriae; and I had to resign myself to the task of opening and dusting every one:  a wretched labour in which I spent that day, like a workman.  But about four I threw them to the devil, having done two hundred odd, and then hummed back in the motor to London.

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