Or, if it should strike a wrong hour—e.g., supposing the Clock should strike 3, and the hour-hand point at 7, then the hour-hand may be moved back to 3, and the Clock afterwards set to the hour of the day in the usual manner.
If, at any future time, the Clock should require regulating, the small steel square above the XII. is the regulator, and turning it a little to the right (half-turn of key) will make the Clock go faster, and to the left, slower. This should be repeated until the desired effect is obtained.
The bell-stud, or arm to which the bell is screwed, is purposely made of soft metal, so that it can be bent up or down so as to obtain a heavy or light blow of the hammer as may be desired.
Both squares in the dial should be wound once a week.
TURRET CLOCKS.
A Church tower without a clock and bells seems an unfurnished edifice, which must be fitted and filled before it can serve the purpose for which it was built;—like a form without life, a body without a soul. A good Church clock is useful to everybody; it is the friendly monitor alike of rich and poor,—the regulator of every private time-piece,—the standard of time for a whole parish or township. By it the artisan or mechanic trudges off to his daily labour; by it the tradesman opens and closes his shop; by it the schoolboy is admonished as 'with shining morning face he creeps like snail unwillingly to school;' by it the law itself regulates its penalties,—(enacting, as it does, house-breaking between nine at night and six in the morning to be the heavier crime of burglary;)—by it, in a word, are all the multifarious transactions of everyday life more or less regulated and measured, and when the church clock stops, it produces a social discomfort and anarchy throughout a whole neighbourhood, to an extent scarcely credible. A good public clock is a benefit to all,—a faulty one is a general nuisance and a continual source of irritation. A public clock is in its way as necessary as the public highway, the public market, the public law itself. It is the product and the symbol of advanced civilization, the one everwakeful watchman and trusty friend of all, by whose chimes the sleepless merchant has often planned his ventures or sighed o'er apprehended losses and dangers; the student busied with researches has consumed the midnight oil; the sick have counted their hours of pain, longing in the night for the dawn, in the daytime for the night. On the other hand, when one like Mr Justice Shallow is reminded of the mad days of his London youth, he very aptly associates them with the Bacchanalian memories which Falstaff appeals to,—'We have heard the chimes at midnight.'
To have lived 'where bells have knoll'd to church' was according to Shakspeare to have been blessed by humanizing influences comparable with those produced by having—
'Sat at good men's feasts, and wiped our eyes Of drops that sacred pity has engendered.'