ledgment of my
awkward compliments.

Then I plucked up courage and made bold to express to him the surprise
I had felt, not only at the marvellous vividness with which the actions
had been repeated before my eyes, like life itself in form and in color
and in motion, but also at the startling fact that some of the things I
had been shown were true and some were false. Some of them had happened
actually to real men and women of flesh and blood, while others were
but bits of vain imagining of those who tell tales as an art and as a
means of livelihood.

I expressed myself as best I could, clumsily, no doubt; but he listened
patiently and with the smile of toleration on his lips.

"Yes," he answered, "I understand your surprise that the facts and the
fictions are mingled together in these visions of mine as though there
was little to choose between them. You are not the first to wonder or
to express that wonder; and the rest of them were young like you. When
you are as old as I am--when you have lived as long as I--when you have
seen as much of life as I--then you will know, as I know, that fact is
often inferior to fiction, and that it is often also one and the same
thing; for what might hare been is often quite as true as what actually
was?"

I did not know what to say in answer to this, and so I said nothing.

"What would you say to me," he went on--and now it seemed to me that
his smile suggested rather pitying condescension than kindly
toleration--"what would you say to me, if I were to tell you that I
myself have seen all the many visions unrolled before you in these
instruments? What would you say, if I declared that I had gazed on the
dances of Salome and of Esmeralda? that I had beheld the combat of
Achilles and Hector and the mounted fight of Saladin and the Knight of
the Leopard?"

"You are not Time himself?" I asked in amaze.

He laughed lightly, and without bitterness or mockery.

"No," he answered, promptly, "I am not Time himself. And why should you
think so? Have I a scythe? Have I an hour-glass? Have I a forelock? Do
I look so very old, then?"

I examined him more carefully to answer this last question, and the
more I scrutinized him the more difficult I found it to declare his
age. At first I had thought him to be forty, perhaps, or of a certainty
less than fifty. But now, though his hair was black, though his eye was
bright, though his step was firm, though his gestures were free and
sweeping,