f reflected from a
watch-case, working handily amongst a hundred ticking pieces, of which
he looked to be one. There were large sundials for the outer walls of
barns and farm-houses, very popular in the Pennsylvania hills;
sand-glasses for the Peninsula, where it cost nothing to fill them;
and hour-burning candles, much affected by the Chesapeake gentry,
which gave at once light and time. There were ancient striking clocks,
such as the monks may have used to disturb them for early prayers,
which, with a horrible rattle of wheels and clash of heavy weights,
hammered the alarm. There were the tremendous watches of river
captains who had aspired to go to sea, and old crutch escapement
watches which Huygens himself had perhaps handled in Holland. The
window was filled with trains of wheels and pinions, snails and racks,
crystals, and faces and watches, cackling at each other. There were
striking clocks which rung chimes or rocked like little vessels on
apparent billows, or started off with notes like grasshoppers. A
hundred of the most musical tree-frogs shut up in a piano might give a
feeble notion of the tunes and thrummings assembled in this shop. It
was the same day or night, and the power of Fithian Minuit over
time-keepers was nearly miraculous. He appeared to be able to smile an
old watch into action. Transferred to his hand, some spent and rusty
sentinel, long silent and useless, seemed to feel the warmth of the
mender and resumed the round of duty. He would buy from the old estate
halls on the Sassafras and the Chester rivers, tall, solemn clocks,
dead to the purpose of their creation, their stately learned faces
lost to former automatic expressions or waggery, and when exposed to
the infectious influences of his shop, a gurgle of sound as of the
inhalation of air into their lungs had been heard, according to some
people, and next day the carcass of the clock would be found resonant
and its faculties recovered. One day the great patriots, John
Dickinson and Caesar Rodney, riding past Christina together, stopped
for dinner, and sent their watches in to be cleaned meantime.

"'Minuit,' said Rodney, 'you are a devil with a time-keeper!'

"'Nay, Minuit,' said Dickinson, 'thou art the gentlest custodian of
time in our parts. I would some one could regulate these States and
times like thee.'

"The country round resorted to Minuit for repairs, but he generally
came himself along the roads fortuitously about the time an