nutes; which was
equivalent to a longitudinal variation of eighteen miles. The ship had
been absent from Portsmouth one hundred and forty-seven days.

This signal triumph was won after forty years of labor and experiment.
The commissioners demanding another trial, the watch was taken to
Barbadoes, and, after an absence of a hundred and fifty-six days, showed
a variation of only fifteen seconds. After other and very exacting
tests, it was decided that John Harrison had fulfilled all the
prescribed conditions, and he received accordingly the whole sum of
twenty thousand pounds sterling.

It is now asserted by experts that he owed the success of his watch, not
so much to originality of invention, as to the exquisite skill and
precision of his workmanship. He had one of the most perfect mechanical
hands that ever existed. It was the touch of a Raphael applied to
mechanism.

John Harrison lived to the good old age of eighty-three years. He died
in London in 1776, about the time when General Washington was getting
ready to drive the English troops and their Tory friends out of Boston.
It is not uncommon nowadays for a ship to be out four or five months,
and to hit her port so exactly as to sail straight into it without
altering her course more than a point or two.

PETER FANEUIL,

AND THE GREAT HALL HE BUILT.

A story is told of the late Ralph Waldo Emerson's first lecture, in
Cincinnati, forty years ago. A worthy pork-packer, who was observed to
listen with close attention to the enigmatic utterances of the sage, was
asked by one of his friends what he thought of the performance.

"I liked it very well," said he, "and I'm glad I went, because I learned
from it how the Boston people pronounce Faneuil Hall."

He was perhaps mistaken, for it is hardly probable that Mr. Emerson gave
the name in the old-fashioned Boston style, which was a good deal like
the word _funnel_. The story, however, may serve to show what a
widespread and intense reputation the building has. Of all the objects
in Boston it is probably the one best known to the people of the United
States, and the one surest to be visited by the stranger. The Hall is a
curious, quaint little interior, with its high galleries, and its
collection of busts and pictures of Revolutionary heroes. Peter Faneuil
little thought what he was doing when he built it, though he appears to
have been a man of liberal and enlightened mind.

The Faneuils were prosperous