MODERN WATCHES:
THEIR VARIETIES AND MODES OF MANUFACTURE.
'He that would wear a watch two things must do,— Pocket his watch and watch his pocket too.'—Old Maxim.
The first possession of a watch by young persons of either sex is perhaps one of the most vividly retained of all their early memories. The sense of responsibility, of importance, which such a wonderful little piece of mechanism gives to them, the alacrity with which they thenceforth note the flight of time and compare the working of all other time-pieces, is remarkable. One of the first things usually done by the juvenile with his or her watch is, curiously enough, to challenge thereby the performance of the old-established time-pieces in the house,—even the infallible old Hall Clock, a very Nestor among clocks, does not escape scrutiny. Woe be to his ancient reputation if, when 'weighed by the new balances'—compensation or otherwise,—he be 'found wanting.' The yet unfledged urchin will, upon the evidence of his own newly-acquired chronometer, unhesitatingly expose and denounce the slightest delinquency of the antique time-piece, and pride and plume himself accordingly. At this time of day, when watches of a sound and durable kind may be had for a comparatively small sum, and when education commences so early, it may be supposed that youths attain earlier to years of discretion, and so rise to the dignity of watch-wearers sooner than their predecessors did. Anyhow, the value of time can scarcely be inculcated at too juvenile an age, nor can it be brought home to the mind of the pupil without providing him with the means of studying the operations of his own personal time-keeper. From the hour when such a gift comes into his possession until the latest day of his life a watch remains his indispensable mentor, and, literally, his bosom-friend. There are few, perhaps none, who can look upon the face of an old watch, their day and night companion for many years, without associating it with the bygone times when it reckoned off for them their moments of pain or anxiety, their joys and sorrows. There is perhaps scarcely any memento of a friend or relative so suggestive as that semi-living object which has been his constant friend for so long, the chief valuable of all his 'portable property.'
Our Old English popular rhymes and songs have frequently been pointed with witticisms directed at the care with which watches have been guarded, or the dexterity with which they have been filched away. Who can overlook the evergreen old dramatic joke, of which the point consisted in connecting the time-teller with the name of the ancient street-guardian; e.g.:—
'I knocked him down, then snatched it from his fob. "Watch, watch!" cried he, when I had done the job; "My watch is gone!" said he: said I, "Just so, Stop where you are, watches were made to go."'
The Horizontal Watch. | The Skeleton Lever Watch. |
Who can forget Dickens's description of the watch of the wonderful Captain Cuttle, which, if you set so far forward at night and so far backward in the morning, was asserted to be 'a watch that would do anybody credit;' or again, how can we omit mention of that earlier Dickensian figure, mentioned by Sam Weller, wearing his enormous watch with so much happy fearlessness, his seals dangling from his fob, the continual temptation and despair of eager pick-pockets, whose ineffectual efforts to abstract the watch from such a tightly-protuberant stomach, were the never ceasing delight of its jolly proprietor? Who shall narrate the characteristics of the various fashions in watches, and the trinkets that were worn along with them, the manners of the fine gentlemen who carried two at a time soon after swords were exchanged for walking-canes, and when pantaloons anticipated the easier but less graceful trowsers? Snuff-boxes, bag-wigs, pig-tails, high cravats, shoe-buckles, have all gone more or less out of fashion, but the watch is a perennial, which may indeed change its outer-casing and its decorations, like man himself, but knows no period of absolute disuse since first it started into being.