ing money into it?"

"I suppose the public rated it a wildcat scheme," responded Christopher.

"Yes, it seemed very impractical to business men. When you have to build
up a factory system from the machinery itself, you have something
gigantic on your hands. And that is the task on which Mr. Dennison and
Mr. Howard embarked. I suppose nobody will ever appreciate the trials
those dauntless pioneers went through. Four years they worked in their
Roxbury factory and only had a few hundred watches to show for all their
toil. Nevertheless the experience taught them many things and chief
among these was the fact that they must have more room. Accordingly in
1854 they put up a new factory at Waltham, Massachusetts, and it is this
structure, standing to this day, that was the first building of the
Waltham Watch factory."

"So the Waltham Watch factory is the grandfather of all the others, is
it?" commented Christopher.

"It is both the oldest and the largest," declared McPhearson. "It also
is the place where the factory system of watch manufacture had its
beginning. The general disbelief of the public was, however, a great
obstacle to the prosperity of the infant enterprise. Often both Mr.
Dennison and Mr. Howard were bitterly disheartened. The outlay for
constructing machinery, buying materials, and experimenting licked up
capital with terrifying rapidity. Had not two Boston men, Mr. Samuel
Curtis and Mr. Charles Rice, had faith enough to back the project
financially, it certainly would have gone to pieces. Even as it was
quantities of money were sunk before any results were forthcoming. The
parts of a watch are so small and so delicate that to produce machinery
that would make them and make them so that one did not vary from another
by so much as a hair-breadth--well, there were moments when it seemed
almost futile to try to do it. For, you know, if any part of a watch is
even so much as one five-thousandth of an inch out of the way, it is
good-by to the watch. It won't go--that is all!"

"I had no idea such a variation as that would count for anything,"
gasped his listener. "Why, it must have been terrible to figure
machinery down to that point! I shouldn't think Mr. Dennison or Mr.
Howard would ever have wanted to look at another watch."

"I imagine there were times when they didn't," was McPhearson's grave
response. "But for all that they persisted. Fortunately they made a
pretty good team, so far as training went, for