A man, waiting for a coach in Newcastle, finds himself taken through time and face to face
with Saint Bede, whereupon a philosophical conversation about time and the future ensues.
— Michael Main
It must suffice then to say that, at the point where I come again into perfect possession
of my consciousness, the venerable monk and I were conferring, in an easy manner, upon
various points connected with his age, or with mine, and both of us having a clear
understanding, and perfect recollection of the fact, that, at this same moment, he was
actually living in the eighth century, and I as truly in the nineteenth; nor did this
trifing difference of a thousand years or more—this break, as geologists would call
it—this fault in the strata of time—perplex either of us a whit; any more than two
friends are molested by the circumstance of their happening to encounter each other just
as they arrive from opposite hemispheres.