or to see the pendulums of the Dutch
clocks wagging at different rates, some with excited haste, others with
solemn gravity, and no two at the same speed. Each seemed confident it
was in direct communication with Greenwich Observatory, and paid not
the slightest attention to the others. It was seldom that the footpath
in front of the watchmaker's window was empty. Generally a boy or girl
stood there with nose flattened against the panes staring at Giacomo
busied with his craft. For it was a genuine mystery to the children,
and he was a mysterious person in other ways. Under his care was the
church clock. He went up into the tower, and into a great closet in
which nobody else in Cowfold had ever been. Furthermore, as an adjunct
to the watchmaking, he repaired barometers and thermometers, and it is
certain that not a farmer within ten miles of Cowfold knew what was at
the back of the plate of his weather-glass.

How a man with such a name as Tacchi came to settle in Cowfold was
never understood. Giacomo's father and mother appeared there about the
beginning of the century: a son was born within three years after their
arrival, and is the Tacchi now before us.

It might have been supposed that his occupation would have inclined him
to melancholy. Far from it. He was a brisk, active creature, about
middle height, with jet black hair, and a quick circulation. He was
never overcome, as he might reasonably have been, with meditations on
the flux of time. He never rose in the morning saddened by the thought
that the day would be just like the day before, or that the watches
with which he had to deal would show just the same faults and just the
same carelessness on the part of their possessors. On the contrary, he
always sprang out of bed with as much zest and buoyancy as if he were a
Columbus confidently expecting that before noon the shores of a new
world would rise over the ocean's edge.

Giacomo, when he succeeded to the business, married the daughter of a
small farmer in the neighbourhood. It all came about through a couple
of little oak wedges. He took a tall clock home after it had been
repaired, and as the floor of the living-room on which it stood was
uneven, the front of the clock at the base was always wedged up to
bring it perpendicular, and keep the top from overhanging. He was
obliged to ask Miriam, the eldest girl, to stand on a footstool, and
push the clock towards the wall. As she stretched he