Similarly a man who committed a murder twenty years
ago and has since lived peaceably and harmlessly in society seems less guilty and his action more due to the law of inevitability, to someone who considers his action after twenty years have elapsed than to one who examined it the day after it was committed.
And this was the reason that, long
ago, In this kingdom by the sea, A wind blew out of a cloud by night Chilling my ANNABEL LEE; So that her high-born kinsmen came And bore her away from me, To shut her up, in a sepulchre In this kingdom by the sea.
The man who wrote that word upon the wall disappeared from the midst of the generations of man many centuries
ago; the word, in its turn, has been effaced from the wall of the church; the church will, perhaps, itself soon disappear from the face of the earth.
And through the charred and desolated area--perhaps twenty square miles altogether--that encircled the Martian encamp- ment on Horsell Common, through charred and ruined villages among the green trees, through the blackened and smoking arcades that had been but a day
ago pine spinneys, crawled the devoted scouts with the heliographs that were presently to warn the gunners of the Martian approach.
The name of this old book helps us to remember that long
ago there was no paper, and that books were written on vellum made from calf-skin and upon parchment made from sheep-skin.
"Twenty years
ago to-night," said the man, "I dined here at 'Big Joe' Brady's with Jimmy Wells, my best chum, and the finest chap in the world.
Though so short a period
ago --not a good life-time --the census of the buffalo in Illinois exceeded the census of men now in London, and though at the present day not one horn or hoof of them remains in all that region; and though the cause of this wondrous extermination was the spear of man; yet the far different nature of the whale-hunt peremptorily forbids so inglorious an end to the Leviathan.
It's all so long
ago, and so much has happened, and we've grown so old, and so much is going to happen that I'm fairly frightened."
I am not going to see them, I was sick of them long
ago. I've been here three days and have called on no one.
Sixpence a year wasn't enough to live on-- even in those days, long
ago; and if the Doctor hadn't had some money saved up in his money- box, no one knows what would have happened.
Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years
ago, so still it must be said, "The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
Martin, who died just fifty years
ago on the very anniversary of Trafalgar.
All is purity and order in this once dreary room, for, fifteen years
ago, it was entered by a new presiding spirit.
They were all melancholy old creatures, who had been unfortunate in life, and whose greatest misfortune it was that they were not long
ago in their graves.
the woman is dying of that disease that wasted the skirts of Camelot two years
ago."
