"Yes; it belonged to my deceased father."
"I will buy it from you."
"You are not in earnest, surely, uncle: it is not likely I should sell it."
"To me you certainly might."
"Not even to you, though I hope you will not be offended."
"Very well; then make me a present of it. I will give you something in return some day."
"Uncle, I scarcely can tell—I really don't know what to say; but my feeling is, that I cannot bear to part with the file."
"Very good!—'Stay there,'" said he to the tool, hanging it up again in its place; and soon he was walking down to the valley with Ibrahim.
People came from miles distant, and from quite the other side of the valley, to admire the clock; and Franzl was particularly pleased when the first man out of her village, Kunslingen, the balance maker, came and said openly—"Such an instrument has not been produced in our country for a hundred years. It is a pity that it must be dumb while it is travelling; and that it cannot go on playing all the way from here to Odessa, saying—'I come from the Black Forest—clever men must live there to complete such mechanism.'"
Franzl smiled with delight, and said—"This is the way the Kunslingen people speak—no others, from any part of the world, are as clever as they are." She told them how long and how eagerly Lenz had worked at the clock, and how often he used to rise in the night to adjust some part of the instrument, which had just struck him as requiring improvement. There were mysteries in the trade which few could explain. She, of course, was one of the initiated; and no girl's heart, listening to a first declaration of love, could receive it with greater delight than Franzl, when she heard the most esteemed man in her village say—"Yes, Franzl; and a house from which such a work proceeds—so accurate and so delicate—such a house must be a well ordered one, so you have some share in the merit also."