must try and explain what Old Style and New
Style--in reckoning the days of the year--mean.

First let me ask you how you can count the days. Supposing you wish to
remain just one day and night in a certain place, how will you know when
you have stayed the proper time? In one of two ways. 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. 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.

Now in time these odd hours added together would come to days, and the
days to years. About fifteen hundred years of this little difference
between the Sun and the Clock would bring it up to a year. So that if
you went by the Clock you would say, "It is fifteen hundred years since
such a thing happened." And if you went by the Sun you would say, "It is
fifteen hundred and one years since it happened."

Men who could think and calculate saw how inconvenient this would be,
and what mistakes it would lead to. If the difference did not come to
much in their lifetime, they could see that it would come to a serious
error for other people some day. So Julius Caesar thought he would pull
the Clock and the Sun together by adding one day every four years to the
Clock's year to make up for the odd hours the Sun had been spinning out
during the three years before. The odd day was added to the month of
February, and that year (in which there are three hundred and sixty-six
days) is called Leap Year.

You remember the old saw--

"Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November;
February hath twenty-eight alone,
All the rest have thirty-one;
_Except in Leap Year, at which time
February's days are twenty-nine_."

This is called the Old Style of reckoning.

Now I dare say you think the matter was quite settled; but it was not,
unfortunately--the odd day every four years was just a