Page:Pieces People Ask For.djvu/68

And when the dial-hands, creeping, pointed
The smallest hour on the disk of day,
Click! from the piecemeal pile, rejointed,
A new-made manikin jumped away.
Nimble-handed, a small, trim figure,
Briskly he stooped where his work begun,
Seized a mallet with nervous vigor,
And loud on the echoing gong struck one.
Clang! and the hammer that made the clamor
Dropped, and lay where it lay before,
And the arms of the holder fell off at the shoulder,
And his head went rolling down to the floor,
And the little man tumbled, and cracked, and crumbled,
Till the human shape that he lately bore,
With a shiver and start all rattled apart,
And vanished—as if to rise no more.

Dead! ere the great bell's musical thunder
In the listening chambers throbbed away,—
No eye discovered the hidden wonder
(That dreaming under the ruins lay),—
Dead as the bones in the prophet's valley,
Waiting with never a stir or sound,
While the pendulum's tick, tick, tick, kept tally,
And the busy wheels of the clock went round,—
Till another hour, to its limit creeping,
Its sign those bodiless limbs shot through,
And a pair of manikins, swift up-leaping,
Loud on the echoing gong struck two.
Clang! clang! and the brazen hammers
Dropped, and lay where they lay before,
And the arms of the holders fell off their shoulders,
And their heads went rolling down to the floor,
And the little men tumbled, and cracked, and crumbled,
And vanished—as if to rise no more.

Still as the shells of the sea-floor, sleeping
Countless fathoms the waves below;
Still as the stones of a city heaping
The path of an earthquake ages ago,
Lay the sundered forms; but steadily swinging,
Beat the slow pendulum,—tick, tick, tick,—
Till lo! at the third hour, suddenly springing,
Rose three men's limbs with a click, click, click.