To Those Who Tell Us What Time It Is.

Before introducing our subject, my dear reader, let me give a moment to a little person whose caprices equal those of any woman living.

Brilliant as the most fashionable beauty, she never goes without her diamonds and rubies in their golden setting, and of which she is equally proud.

Her little babbling is heard continually; and while she boasts her independent movements, like any prisoner or slave she always wears her chain.

I call her a little person, because she accompanies me everywhere; though sometimes she stops while I walk, and goes again when I am inclined to stop.

This delicate, fantastical organization, so difficult to discipline, and as subject to the influences of cold and heat as any nervous lady or chilly invalid, is Mademoiselle—my watch.

You have nearly all, my dear readers, a watch of silver or gold in your vest-pocket, and you can have them of wood or mother-of-pearl, with one great advantage: they cannot be pawned.

Ladies wear watches whose cases shine with their diamonds like the decorations of a great officer of the Legion of Honor. And they can have them inserted in bracelets, in bon-bon boxes, and in buckles for sashes and belts.

But I must tell you, the first accurate instruments, after the sun-dial and hour-glass of the ancients, were huge clocks; and these clocks, so immense, led artists insensibly to construct smaller ones for apartments, in form of pendulums, and which were in the beginning very imperfect.

Then others still more skilful conceived the idea of portable clocks, to which they gave the name of montres, (watches, in English,) from montrer, to show.

But at first these ornaments were very awkward, and of inconvenient size for the pocket to which they were destined.

Finally, however, they were lessened to such a point that they graced the heads of canes, the handles of fans, and even the setting of rings, and were about the size of a five-cent silver piece.

It is to Hook, a physician and English philosopher, born in 1635, died in 1702, that we owe the invention of pocket watches.

In 1577, the first watches were brought from Germany to England. They had been made at Nuremberg for the first time in the year 1500, and were called the eggs of Nuremberg, on account of their oval form.

At last a man appeared who, not content to enchain time, endeavored to force matter to represent with greater accuracy the flight of years. This was Julien le Roy, the most skilful practical philosopher that France ever had. Always on the qui vive for everything useful and curious, as soon as he heard of the watches of the celebrated Graham, he imported the first one seen in Paris, and not until he had proved it would he relinquish it to M. Maupertuis. Graham, in turn, procured all he could from Julien le Roy. One day my Lord Hamilton was showing one of these wonderful repeaters to several persons. "I wish I were younger," said Graham, "to be able to make one after this model."

This illustrious Maupertuis, who accompanied the king of Prussia to the battle-field, was made prisoner at Molwitz and conducted to Vienna. The grand-duke of Tuscany—since emperor—wished to see a man with so great a reputation.

He treated him with respect, and asked him if he had not regretted much of the baggage stolen from him by the hussars. Maupertuis, after being urged a long time, confessed he would gladly have saved an old watch of Graham's, which he used for his astronomical observations.

The grand-duke, who owned one by the same maker, but enriched with diamonds, said to the French mathematician, "Ah! the hussars have wished to play you a trick; they have brought me back your watch. Here it is; I restore it to you."

To-day, as formerly, the handling of watches is an art. It is much more difficult to measure time than wine or cider. Therefore, among the members of the Bureau of Longitudes, by the side of the senator Leverrier, the marshal of France, (M. Vaillant,) the Admiral Matthieu, is placed the simple clock-maker, M. Bregnet.

And for these artists who give us the means of knowing the hour it is, there is a publication as serious as the Journal of Debates, called the Chronometrical Review. It certainly should be regularly sent to its subscribers. If the carrier is late, it cannot be for want of knowing if he has to-day's or yesterday's paper; and the subscribers are never exposed to chercher midi à quatorze heures.

M. Claudius Saurrier, the chief editor of this Chronometrical Review, has also a clock-maker's annual almanac for 1869. This appears very abstruse at the first glance; but if we examine the little volume with the same nicety as a watchmaker his mainspring—that is to say, with a powerful magnifying glass—we will find some things to greatly interest us. For example, a sketch of different attainable speed:

Miles per hour.
The soldier in ordinary step makes 2¾
The soldier in a charge4
The soldier in gymnastic exercise7
The horse walking3
The horse on the trot7
The horse on the gallop14
The horse on the race-course30
The locomotive at ordinary speed30
The locomotive going rapidly60
The current of the Seine3
Steamboats 4 to 14

A railroad train making thirty miles the hour would consume about three hundred and fifty years in the journey from the earth to the sun. More than a dozen successive generations would have time to appear and disappear during the transit.

But nothing can more surely measure speed than the man who says to his watch, "Thou givest me sixty seconds a minute, and thou canst go no farther."

The little book which has so worthily occupied my attention is not contented with simply describing professional instruments. It plunges into old curiosity shops, and brings out the watch of Marat!

Evidently it does not tell us if this watch was hung in the bathing saloon where the friend of the people was struck by the poignard of Charlotte Corday. But it gives us an exact description of the jewel, or rather of the onion of the celebrated and redoubtable tribune.

It was, indeed, a curious watch that Marat possessed; and, if we cannot imagine the fashion of the epoch, which gave to every one an immense gewgaw, requiring a counter-weight to support it, it will be impossible to explain the oddity of its form.

It was a massive silver pear, opening into two equal parts. In the lower part of the fruit was found the dial; the upper contained engraved designs of foliage. The case of the pear reproduced the same model; the artist evidently had but one idea. Its size was that of an English pear of medium dimensions, and, thanks to its density, this jewel has been able to pass without any deterioration through the most stormy periods of the world.

The almanac for clock-makers also contains its good stories. It relates that a thief introduced himself into a watch-store as a workman seeking employment, but with the design of abstracting the pocket-book of the proprietor. The scene is dialogued as the two parts of a clock containing the chimes of the north, the solemn stillness of the night broken by question and response, until they mingled in a naïve contre-point.

"Thy purse," said the thief.

"I have forgotten it."

"Thy chain."

"I only wear a ribbon."

"Pshaw! no more ceremony. Look at thy watch. What hour is it?"

"The hour of thy death!" replied the young man in a thundering voice, presenting at the same time a double-barrelled pistol at his head.

"Oh! oh!" said the thief, "I was only joking."

"So much the worse. Come, thy purse."

The thief handed it to him.

"Thy chain."

And the chain followed the purse.

"Thy watch."

The thief, trembling from head to foot, drew out a package of watches, entangled one in the other.

"Oh! oh! I have you now. Get out, file to the left, turn thy dial, and go."

And the pickpocket withdrew.

The young watch-maker, perfectly astonished, went immediately to the mayor. They counted twenty-two watches; and the grateful proprietors handsomely indemnified him for his trouble, while at the same time he found himself, by this one stroke, with twenty-two good jobs and a patronage.

Had I time, I could extract many more interesting things from this little work.

For example, a description of a watch made by the grandfather of the present Bregnet—the perpetual watch, so called because it winds itself through some simple movement inserted by the maker. And I could give, also, good advice to wearers of watches.

Where to put them at night.

The manner and time to wind them, and the management of the little needle that makes them go slower and faster.

Then, again, the injury done watches by trotting horsemen, especially physicians, who thereby lose an accurate guide for the pulse of their patients.

Then I should like to consider how Abraham Bregnet made the sympathetic clock, upon which it is only necessary to place before midday or midnight a pocket repeating-watch, advancing or retarding it a little to allow for the time consumed, and by simple contact it regulates the pendulum.

If M. Claudius Saurrier wants something curious for his almanac of the coming year, he has only to take the chapter on clock-making from The Arts of the Middle Ages, by Paul Lacroix. There he will see the three primitive methods of measuring time, namely, the sun-dial or gnomon that Anximandre imported from Greece; the clepsydra, where the flowing water indicated the flying minutes; and the hour-glass, where the sand took the place of the water.

He will find there a watch of the house of Valois placed in the centre of a Latin cross, and moving with it symbolical figures, Time, Apollo, Diana, etc.; or, again, the Virgin, the apostles and saints.

Time has not always been lost through the instruments that indicate its flight. Ages have changed even palaces; and the Palais Royal, whose cannon gives us still the exact hour of mid-day, once knew no hours for its habitués, and vice and immorality consumed the time that virtue now gives to better purposes. The poet of 1830 said:

"The palace lives in better days,
And virtue holds its court supreme;
The sun that lent to vice its rays
Now gives to time its potent beam."

But now that I have rendered every tribute to M. Claudius Saurrier that his special science can demand, may I not be equally frank with him?

I don't like to know what time it is; I am seized with profound melancholy when the clock strikes and as the hands of my watch indicate the rapidity with which my life is passing.

If there had never been an hourglass, a clepsydra, a clock, a regulator, a Swiss cuckoo, or a French chronometer, what with the variations of the seasons which are no longer regular—the trees leafing in January, and the house-tops iced in April—we might never be sure of anything, and lead the existence of those who frequented the balls of the tenor Roger. With shutters closed and curtains drawn, the sun excluded for four days, his guests could have doubted whether time had anything to do with their existence.

Then we could so long believe ourselves young! The dreaded question How old are you? could be answered in all sincerity, I do not know.

One word more, however, for our pretty watch. How often has it been the symbol of gallantry.

A lady asked a poet why he used two watches. He replied immediately:

"Dear madam, shall I tell you why?
One goes too fast, and one too slow;
When near you I would fondly fly,
I use the first; the other, when I go."