he landlord, and the first thing that caught his
eye was my strange bundle. Then he looked at me and said, "Hello,
young man, what's this?"

"Machines," I said, "for keeping time and getting up in the morning,
and so forth."

"Well! Well! That's a mighty queer get-up. You must be a Down-East
Yankee. Where did you get the pattern for such a thing?"

"In my head," I said.

Some one down the street happened to notice the landlord looking
intently at something and came up to see what it was. Three or four
people in that little village formed an attractive crowd, and in
fifteen or twenty minutes the greater part of the population of
Pardeeville stood gazing in a circle around my strange hickory
belongings. I kept outside of the circle to avoid being seen, and had
the advantage of hearing the remarks without being embarrassed. Almost
every one as he came up would say, "What's that? What's it for? Who
made it?" The landlord would answer them all alike, "Why, a young man
that lives out in the country somewhere made it, and he says it's a
thing for keeping time, getting up in the morning, and something that
I didn't understand. I don't know what he meant." "Oh, no!" one of the
crowd would say, "that can't be. It's for something else--something
mysterious. Mark my words, you'll see all about it in the newspapers
some of these days." A curious little fellow came running up the
street, joined the crowd, stood on tiptoe to get sight of the wonder,
quickly made up his mind, and shouted in crisp, confident,
cock-crowing style, "I know what that contraption's for. It's a
machine for taking the bones out of fish."

This was in the time of the great popular phrenology craze, when the
fences and barns along the roads throughout the country were plastered
with big skull-bump posters, headed, "Know Thyself," and advising
everybody to attend schoolhouse lectures to have their heads explained
and be told what they were good for and whom they ought to marry. My
mechanical bundle seemed to bring a good deal of this phrenology to
mind, for many of the onlookers would say, "I wish I could see that
boy's head,--he must have a tremendous bump of invention." Others
complimented me by saying, "I wish I had that fellow's head. I'd
rather have it than the best farm in the State."

I stayed overnight at this little tavern, waiting for a train. In the
morning I went to the station, and set my bundle on the platform.
Along came the thundering trai