long time to attract her attention to the
hands, but I succeeded in making her remark the clockwork and the
striking apparatus. The means I employed were very simple; I asked them
not to have the bell rung for lunch, and everybody got up and went into
the dining-room when the little brass hammer struck twelve o'clock, but I
found great difficulty in making her learn to count the strokes. She ran
to the door each time she heard the clock strike, but by degrees she
learned that all the strokes had not the same value as far as regarded
meals, and she frequently fixed her eyes, guided by her ears, on the dial
of the clock.

"When I noticed that, I took care every day at twelve, and at six
o'clock, to place my fingers on the figures twelve and six, as soon as
the moment she was waiting for had arrived, and I soon noticed that she
attentively followed the motion of the small brass hands, which I had
often turned in her presence.

"She had understood! Perhaps I ought rather to say that she had grasped
the idea. I had succeeded in getting the knowledge, or, rather, the
sensation, of the time into her, just as is the case with carp, who
certainly have no clocks, when they are fed every day exactly at the same
time.

"When once I had obtained that result all the clocks and watches in the
house occupied her attention almost exclusively. She spent her time in
looking at them, listening to them, and in waiting for meal time, and
once something very funny happened. The striking apparatus of a pretty
little Louis XVI clock that hung at the head of her bed having got out of
order, she noticed it. She sat for twenty minutes with her eyes on the
hands, waiting for it to strike ten, but when the hands passed the figure
she was astonished at not hearing anything; so stupefied was she, indeed,
that she sat down, no doubt overwhelmed by a feeling of violent emotion
such as attacks us in the face of some terrible catastrophe. And she had
the wonderful patience to wait until eleven o'clock in order to see what
would happen, and as she naturally heard nothing, she was suddenly either
seized with a wild fit of rage at having been deceived and imposed upon
by appearances, or else overcome by that fear which some frightened
creature feels at some terrible mystery, and by the furious impatience of
a passionate individual who meets with some obstacle; she took up the
tongs from the fireplace and struck the clock so violently that she broke
it to