Page:Pieces People Ask For.djvu/68

58 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.