The second hand on the wall ticked away. Watching it complete one circuit was quick; perhaps it only took a minute to watch it pass all sixty marks.
In factories, workers drenched in sweat would occasionally raise their heads to look at the wall clock. They were always complaining that it was moving too slowly.
They clearly felt as if they had been working for a long time and had used up all their strength, yet only a few minutes had passed.
Some even suspected that the factory owner had tampered with the clock, making it run slower than normal so he could exploit and squeeze more labor out of them.
But that wasn't the truth. Even after confirming again and again that no one had tampered with the damn wall clock, they would still complain while working—
"That damn fat bastard must have tampered with the wall clock. I swear!"
Actually, it wasn't only hard work that made people feel this way. Sometimes studying did too.
Studying was boring. Not all learning was fun. For children who were forced by their teachers to sit in chairs for dozens of minutes at a time, every class seemed to last an entire day.
Whenever the evening sun and sunset clouds appeared, they would sigh from the bottom of their hearts: another long day had finally passed.
But sometimes, people felt that time passed too quickly! Mr. Wickliff lay on a hospital bed, his eyes fixed on the wall clock. It simply ticked away.
No, it wasn't moving. It was stealing!
It was stealing his precious time—that was his life! If possible, he desperately wished time could remain forever in the spring of his thirty-fifth year, when he had been at the peak of his energy and everything in his life had