,
wheels, and parts you needed. You yourself had to make everything with
the scant supply of tools at your command, usually a file, drill, and
hammer. With these you hammered out your brass wheels to the required
thickness, notched the teeth in their edges with the file, and fitted
them into place. And when you consider that with this crude equipment
you were expected to turn out a mechanism delicate enough to tell time,
I am sure you will agree the stern old clockmakers had something on
their side."

"They sure had!" Christopher exclaimed with enthusiasm.

"It is a glory to this Richard Parsons' skill that two hundred years
after he made his clock it is still accurately performing its task. If
anything I made was in existence at the end of a like stretch of time
and was continuing to be useful, I should feel I had a right to be
proud, shouldn't you?"

"You bet I would. Nothing I make ever stays together more than a week."

The Scotchman laughed at the boyish confession.

"Now you can understand, I guess, why I sent Bailey away, telling him I
should have to dream over this bracket clock. Two hundred years is a
long time and methods have changed greatly since then. Therefore in
order to repair such a product, I shall have to think myself back into
the year 1700 and work in the fashion Richard Parsons did; otherwise I
cannot successfully take up his handiwork. A clockmaker has to have
imagination, you see."

"I never thought of that."

"It is such puzzles as these that make my trade interesting," McPhearson
observed. "If every clock that came to me was of precisely the same
pattern as every other, the work I do would be monotonous enough. But
it is because clocks are as different as people that they pique my
curiosity. Even those turned out in factories, for example, are never
twice alike."

"I should think those would _have_ to be alike," Christopher responded.

"You'd think so, and so would I if I had not handled so many and learned
otherwise. No, every clock has its personality, its little tricks. One
doesn't like a cold room, perhaps, and as a protest will stop or lose
time; another shows its disapproval of the heat by being ten minutes
fast. Still another balks at an incline in the mantelpiece, so slight
that nobody can see it, and will not tick even. So it goes. And it is
not always the most expensive clocks and watches, either, that keep the
best time, for sometimes a cheap affair will, for reasons not t