In the course of a short time another of the reporters asked me if I had ever seen the watch that the same youth habitually wore. I replied that I had never seen it, but should like to do so. The same night I was in the reporters’ room, when the one who had mentioned the watch to me asked the wearer of the article if ten o’clock had yet struck. The youth forthwith drew out of his pocket one of the most charming little watches I ever saw. The back was Italian enamel on gold, both outside and within, and the outer case was bordered with forty-five rubies. A black pearl about the size of a pea was at the bow, right round the edge of the case were diamonds, and in the rim for the glass were twenty-five rubies and four stones which I fancied at a casual glance were pale sapphires. I examined these stones with my magnifier, and I thought I should have fainted when I found that they were blue diamonds.
“Le Temps est pour l’Homme,
L’Eternité est pour l’Amour”
was the inscription which I managed to make out on the dial.
I handed back the watch to the reporter—his salary was £120 per annum—and inquired if he had found this article also.
“Yes,” he said, with a laugh. “I picked that up, curiously enough, during a trip that I once made to the Scilly Islands. I advertised it in the Plymouth papers the next day, for I believed it to have been dropped by some wealthy tourist; but I got no applicant for it; and then I came to the conclusion that the watch had been among the treasures of some of the descendants of the smugglers and wreckers of the old days. It keeps good enough time now, though a watchmaker valued the works at five shillings.”
“Any time you want a hundred pounds—a hundred and fifty pounds,” said I, “don’t hesitate to bring that watch to me. Have you found many other articles in the course of your life?” I asked, as I was leaving the room.
“Lots,” he replied. “When I was in Liverpool I lived about two miles from my office, and through getting into a habit of keeping my eyes on the ground, I used to come across something almost every week. Unfortunately, most of my finds were claimed by the owners.”
“You have no reason to complain,” said I.
I was set thinking if there might not be the potentialities of wealth in the art of walking with one’s eyes modestly directed to the ground; and for three nights I was actually idiot enough to walk home from my office with looks, not “commercing with the skies,” but—it was purely a question of commerce—with the pavements. The first night I nearly transfixed a policeman with my umbrella, for the rain was coming down in torrents; the second, I got my hat knocked into the mud by coming in contact with the branch of a tree overhanging the railings of a square, and the third I received the impact of a large-boned tipsy man, who was, as the idiom of the country has it, trying to walk on both sides of the road at once.