n on sea fights," remarked
he, "for as a matter of fact he was anything but a fighter. Undoubtedly
it was the Revolution and the War of 1812 that stimulated the picturing
of such scenes and made them popular. Had war been left to dear
peace-loving old Simon Willard there would not have been much shooting,
for he hated the very sight of a gun. One of his relatives declares that
although like other loyal citizens he turned out at Lexington on the
famous nineteenth of April and marched to Roxbury with Captain Kimball's
company he often humorously asserted afterward that the musket he
carried had no lock on it. The omission, however, did not appear to
trouble him; on the contrary, it rather pleased him. Once, in later
life, he one day picked up a gun that unexpectedly went off with such a
bang that it knocked him down and as a result he could never be tempted
into touching firearms of any description. The argument that they were
not loaded had no effect whatsoever.

"No matter," he would say. "The durn thing may go off just the same."

Christopher laughed merrily.

"It was sometime between 1777 and 1780, as I told you, that Simon
Willard came to Roxbury. But before he focused his entire attention on
clocks he invented a clock-jack, and in 1784 with the approval of John
Hancock, the General Court of Massachusetts granted him the exclusive
right to make and sell the device."

"And what, pray, is a clock-jack?" interrogated Christopher.

"Ah, it is easily seen you did not live in early colonial days," smiled
McPhearson. "A clock-jack, sonny, is a contrivance for roasting meat."

"Roasting meat!" repeated the lad incredulously. "But what had a man of
Willard's genius to do with roasting meat?"

"Perhaps a good deal," the Scotchman answered. "He was the father of a
big family, remember, and no doubt, like all good husbands, bore his
share of the domestic burden. A man with eleven children must have been
forced to turn his shoulder to the wheel in many a domestic crisis, for
nobody kept servants at that time. Evidently either Willard himself had
encountered the dilemmas of cooking or he had seen others struggle with
them, and this, no doubt, was what led him to invent the ingenious
article of which I have told you."

"But you haven't told me," was Christopher's quick protest.

"Why, so I haven't! Well, in the far-away days of our forefathers food
was cooked neither in ranges nor in gas stoves. Instead it was cooked
befo