"Now here is something curious." The Revd produces and makes avail?able to the Company his Facsimile of Pennsylvania's Fair Copy of the Field-Journals of Mason and Dixon, "copied without the touch of human hands, by an ingenious Jesuit device, and printed by Mr. Whimbrel, next to The Seneca Maiden, Philadelphia, 1776."
"Cycles, or if you like, Segments of eleven Days recur again and again. Here, in 1766, eleven days after setting out southward from Brandywine, is Mason paus'd at Williamsburg, the southernmost point of his journey,— next day he leaves for Annapolis, and eleven days later departs that City, to return to work upon the Line,— a very Pendulum. In April, just after crossing the North Mountain, they must wait in the Snow and Rain, from the sixth thro' the sixteenth before resuming. The culmi?nating Pause, of course, is at the Line's End, between 9 October of '67, when the Chief of the Indians that were with them said he would proceed no farther west than the Warrior Path, and the 20th, when the Party, turn?ing their backs for the last time upon the West, began to open the Visto eastward— unto their last Days in America,— " turning the Pages, - from 27 August of '68, when accounts were settl'd and the work was officially over and done with, till 7 September, their last night in Philadelphia before leaving to catch the Halifax Packet at New-York. Again and again, this same rough interval continues to appear,— sug?gesting a hidden Root common to all. And Friends, I believe 'tis none but the famous Eleven Missing Days of the Calendar Reform of '52.”
Cries of "Cousin? we beseech thee!" and "Poh, Sir!" "Those of us born before that fateful September," observes the Revd, "comprise a generation in all British History uniquely insulted, each Life carrying a chronologick Wound, from the same Parliamentary Stroke. Perhaps we are compell'd, even unknowingly, to seek these Undecamerous Sequences, as areas of refuge that may allow us, if only for a moment, to pretend Life undamaged again. We think of 'our' Time, being held, in whatever Time's equivalent to 'a Place' is, like Eurydice, somehow to be redeem'd.—  Perhaps, as our Indian brothers might re-enact some ancient Adventure, correct in all details, so British of a cer?tain Age seek but to redeem Eleven Days of pure blank Duration, as unalienably their own—
"Pull not such faces, young Ethelmer,— one day, should you keep clear of Fate for that long, you may find yourself recalling some Injus?tice, shared with lads and lasses of your own Day, just as uncalmable, and even yet, unredeem'd."
Mason for a while had presum'd it but a matter of confusing dates, which are Names, with Days, which are real Things. Yet for anyone he met born before '52 and alive after it, the missing Eleven Days arose again and again in Conversation, sooner or later characteriz'd as "brute Absence," or "a Tear thro' the fabric of Life,"— and the more he wrestl'd with the Question, the more the advantage shifted toward a Belief, as he would tell Dixon one day, "In a slowly rotating Loop, or if you like, Vortex, of eleven days, tangent to the Linear Path of what we imagine as Ordinary Time, but excluded from it, and repeating itself,— without end."
"Hmm. The same eleven days, over and over, 's what tha're saying... ?" "You show, may I add, an unusual Grasp of the matter." "Why then, as it is a periodick Ro-tation, so must it carry, mustn't it, a Vis centrifuga, that might, with some ingenuity, be detected...? Per?haps by finding, in the Realm of Time, where the Loop tries either to increase or decrease its Circumference, and hence the apparent length of each day in it. Or yet again not rotate at all, the length of the Day then continuing the same,—
"Dixon. Everything rotates.”
"A Vorticist! Lord help us, his Mercy how infrequent!" Emerson, believing Vorticists to be the very Legion of Mischief, had so instructed ev'ry defenseless young Mind he might reach.
"Very well,— if you must know,— lean closer and mark me,— I have been there, Sir."
"'There,'Sir...?"
Mason is gesturing vigorously with his Thumb, at the Eye, much wider than its partner, that he uses for Observation.—  "Tho' I've ever tried not to recollect any more than I must,— at least not till a zealously inquisi?tive Partner insists upon knowing,— yet the fact is that at Midnight of September second, in the unforgiven Year of 'Fifty-two, I myself did stumble, daz'd and unprepared, into that very Whirlpool in Time,— finding myself in September third, 1752, a date that for all the rest of England, did not exist,— Tempus Incognitum."
"Eeh..."
"Don't say it,— I didn't believe it myself. Not until it happen'd, that is,— no Discomfort to it, only a little light-headedness. At the Stroke of the Hour, whilst I continued into the Third, there came an instant Trans-halation of Souls, leaving a great human Vacuum, as ev'ryone else mov'd on to the Fourteenth of September."
"Not sure what that means, of course "
"You'd have felt it as a lapse of consciousness, perhaps. Yet soon
enough I discover'd how alone 'twas possible to be, in the silence that
flow'd, no louder than Wind, from the Valleys and across those Hill-
villages, where, instead of Populations, there now lay but the mute
Effects of their Lives,— Ash-whiten'd Embers that yet gave heat, food
left over from the last Meals of September Second, publick Clocks frozen
for good at midnight between the Second and the day after,— tho' some?
where else, in the World which had jump'd ahead to the Fourteenth, they
continued to tick onward, to be re-wound, to run fast or slow, carrying on
with the ever-Problematick Lives of the Clocks
"Alone in the material World, Dixon, with eleven days to myself. What would you have done?"
"Had a Look in The Jolly Pitman, perhaps...?"
A look of forbearance. "Aye, as my first thoughts were of The George in Stroud,...yet 'twas the absence of Company, that most preoccupied
 me,— seeking which, in some Desperation, before the Sun rose, I set out. Reasoning that if I had been so envortic'd, why so might others— breaking off abruptly, a word or two shy (Dixon by now feels certain) of some fatal confidence, that Rebekah would have stood at the heart of.
Young Charles was to reason eventually, that the pain of separation had lain all upon his side, for she was to bid him good morrow upon the fourteenth, as she had good night upon the second, without a seam or a lurch, appearing to have no idea he'd been away cycling through eleven days without her. Nor had whatever he liv'd through in that Loop, caus'd any perceptible change in the Youth she kiss'd hello "the very next day" in the High Street in Stroud, brazen as a Bell.
Meanwhile there he was, alone, with the better part of a Fortnight before he'd be hooking up again with his Betroth'd, as smoothly as if he'd never been gone,— and, Damme, he would be off. "Were there yet Horses about?" Dixon wishes to know.
"Animals whose Owners knew them, made the Transition along with them, to the fourteenth. 'Most all the dogs, for example. Fewer Cats, but plenty nonetheless. Any that remain'd by the third of September were wild Creatures, or stray'd into the Valley,— perhaps, being ownerless, disconnected as well from Calendars. I found one such Horse, a Horse no one would have known, as well as two Cows unmilk'd and at large. I rode past miles of Crops untended, Looms still'd and water-wheels turning to no avail, Apples nearly ripe, Waggons half-laded, the Weld not yet a-bloom, nor the Woad-mills a-stink, till at length from the last ridge-line, there lay crystalline Oxford, as finely etch'd as my Eyes, better in those days, could detect, nor holding a thread of Smoak in it anywhere—"
"You were making for Oxford... ?"
"Aye, with some crack'd notion I'd find Bradley there— Being a young Bradleyolator, as were all Lens-fellows of that Day, especially 'round Gloucestershire...tho' later, in my Melancholy, I might see more vividly his all-too-earthly connections with Macclesfield and Chester?field, and beyond them, looming in the mephitic Stench, Newcastle and Mr. Pelham. At that Moment, in my Innocence, I believ'd th............