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Updated: September 5, 2025
The only visible articles in the room were those on the window-sill, which showed their shapes against the low sky, the middle article being the old hourglass, and the other two a pair of ancient British urns which had been dug from a barrow near, and were used as flowerpots for two razor-leaved cactuses. Somebody knocked at the door. The servant was out; so was her grandfather.
The sand is running on ever diminishing. New torments assail her. She thinks of all she loves most on earth of her daughter! Oh! if Alizon were near her, she might pray for her might scare away these frightful visions might save her. She calls to her but she answers not. No, she is utterly abandoned of God and man, and must perish eternally. Again she consults the hourglass.
Then the orange curtains parted and on a gilded dais the width of the room, in startling relief against a purple circle the size of a tower clock, the Old Year, hoar on his beard and with limbs that shivered in an attitude of abdication, held out an hourglass to a pink-legged cherub with a gold band in his or her short curls.
From these clouds a few lengthy protuberances escaped, and their points as they fell seemed to draw up hills of foaming water to meet them. Suddenly the water shot up in the form of a gigantic hourglass, and the "Albatross" was enveloped in the eddy of an enormous waterspout, while twenty others, black as ink, raged around her.
My wife returns to Roselands to-morrow." "That's fortunate," quoth Mocket, on his knees before the great fireplace. "You always did cut things mighty close, Lewis, and I must say you are cutting this one close! Adam, he goes along from day to day laughing and singing, with a face as smooth as an egg, but I'll warrant he's watching the sun, the clock, and the hourglass!"
And yet what is this but one grain in the hourglass of time, one day in the lost record of our earth, of its sisters the planets and its father the sun, to say nothing of the universes beyond? It is because I have come in touch with a prolonged though perfectly finite existence of the sort, that I try to pass on the reflections which the fact of it awoke in me.
Peter's, at Rome, there are many tombs, in which death is symbolized in its traditional form as a skeleton, with the fateful hourglass and the fearful scythe. Death is the rude reaper, who cruelly cuts off life and all the joy of life. But there is one in which death is sculptured as a sweet gentle motherly woman, who takes her wearied child home to safer and surer keeping.
The Chamberlain looked wildly at John, then at the hourglass, in which the last grains of sand had sifted down. "The time has come," he said; "the fatal moment is here! I should give the signal for which the executioners wait. But something holds me back. In Heaven's name, what does it all mean? Is it sorcery or " "It is the Lord's will," said John quietly. "Oh, pray, let me see the King."
"Then it couldn't have been much better than the old sundial," the lad sniffed, with contempt. "It had its outs. Nevertheless it held the front of the stage about two thousand years, and then I am sure you will agree it was high time a better device was substituted." "And what was that?" "The sand glass." "Our hourglass, you mean?"
An hourglass has in it a definite quantity of sand; and when I turn it over, that sand falls from the upper apartment into the lower; and while it occupies that position it will continue to fall until the former is exhausted and the latter is filled. Moreover, it will never take its place at the other end of the instrument, until it is turned back. It is precisely thus with a human constitution.
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