4 o'clock by Price Day The hands of the alarm clock on the table in front of Mr. Crangle

stood at 3.47 on a summer afternoon. You're wrong about that, you know, he said, not taking his

eyes from the face of the clock.

You're quite wrong, pet. As I have explained to you often enough before, the moral angle

presents no difficulties at all. The parrot in the cage hanging above him cocked her head

and looked down with a hard, cold, reptilian eye, an ancient eye,

an eye older by age upon age than the human race.

She said,

Mr. Crankel, his eye still on the clock, took a peanut from a cracker bowl at his elbow,

and held it above his head to the bars of the cage.

Pet clutched in a leathery claw, the spring steel muscles open the horny beak.

She clinched the peanut and crushed it.

The sound mingling in the furnished room,

with the big city sounds coming through the open window.

Cars honking, feet on the sidewalk,

children calling to each other,

a plane overhead, like a contented industrious bee.

He had studied over the alternatives day and night, since that morning three weeks ago,

when, as he sat on a bench in the park, looking at the pictures in the clouds across the lake,

it came to him that he had the power to do this thing, that upon him at that

moment had been bestowed the gift of putting a mark on all the bad people on earth, so that they

should be known. The realization surprised him not at all. Once before, such a thing had

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