hat
city people were not over polite.

The workmen were just finishing the interior of the City Hall, and he
was greatly puzzled to understand how those winding stone stairs could
be fixed without any visible means of support. In New Jersey he found
another wonder. The people there kept Christmas more strictly than
Sunday; a thing very strange to a child of the Puritans, who hardly knew
what Christmas was.

Every winter added something to his knowledge of clock-making, and, soon
after he was out of his apprenticeship, he bought some portions of
clocks, a little mahogany, and began to put clocks together on his own
account, with encouraging success from the beginning.

It was a great day with him when he received his first magnificent order
from a Southern merchant for twelve wooden clocks at twelve dollars
apiece! When they were done, he delivered them himself to his customer,
and found it impossible to believe that he should actually receive so
vast a sum as a hundred and forty-four dollars. He took the money with a
trembling hand, and buttoned it up in his pocket. Then he felt an awful
apprehension that some robbers might have heard of his expecting to
receive this enormous amount, and would waylay him on the road home.

He worked but too steadily. He used to say that he loved to work as well
as he did to eat, and that sometimes he would not go outside of his gate
from one Sunday to the next. He soon began to make inventions and
improvements. His business rapidly increased, though occasionally he had
heavy losses and misfortunes.

His most important contribution to the business of clock-making was his
substitution of brass for wood in the cheap clocks. He found that his
wooden clocks, when they were transported by sea, were often spoiled by
the swelling of the wooden wheels. One night, in a moment of extreme
depression during the panic of 1837, the thought darted into his mind,--

"A cheap clock can be made of brass as well as wood!"

It kept him awake nearly all night. He began at once to carry out the
idea. It gave an immense development to the business, because brass
clocks could be exported to all parts of the world, and the cost of
making them was greatly lessened by new machinery. It was Chauncey
Jerome who learned how to make a pretty good brass clock for forty
cents, and a good one for two dollars; and it was he who began their
exportation to foreign lands. Clocks of his making ticked during his
lifeti