Arthur Pendelton was a man of peculiar chronological habits. He was born at the age of eighty-four with a full mortgage, a set of keys, and a severe dislike of modern youth.
“It was a difficult childhood,” he told me, while sucking on a pipe that he was un-smoking. “I had to spend my first ten years paying off the house, and I was constantly worried about my joints.”
As the years went by, Arthur grew younger. By the time he was fifty, he was climbing trees and refusing to pay his taxes on the grounds that he was “only a growing boy.”
The main difficulty was conversational. Arthur always knew what you were going to say before you said it, but he forgot it immediately after you spoke. It made discussions very efficient but rather drafty.
“Tomorrow,” he said to me on a Monday, “I shall have a terrible cold.”
And indeed, the previous Sunday, he had sneezed eighteen times.
When last I saw Arthur, he was three years old, wearing a bowler hat that covered his entire face, and trying to crawl into a pram containing a very surprised cat. We expect him to vanish entirely by next Thursday, or possibly yesterday.