"Oh, I suppose the darn thing froze—that probably was the next obstacle," grinned Christopher.
"It was," nodded McPhearson.
"Then it couldn't have been much better than the old sundial," the lad sniffed, with contempt.
"It had its outs. Nevertheless it held the front of the stage about two thousand years, and then I am sure you will agree it was high time a better device was substituted."
"And what was that?"
"The sand glass."
"Yes—or half-hour, quarter-hour—any fraction of an hour you choose. The idea of the sand glass was not entirely new, because some form of running sand had long before been used in the Far East. But the sand glass as we know it was new to the European world, and you cannot but agree it was a far more practical article than was the clepsydra for it neither froze nor had to be replenished. Moreover, it was lighter, less bulky, and could be carried about, and the old water clocks could not—that is, not without great inconvenience and danger of breaking. Oh, the sand glass was vastly better! Even now, after all these years, it is not entirely out of date, for it is still used to mark definite intervals of time."
"I have one at home to practice by."
"Many persons use them," the clockmaker averred. "It is not unusual to have speakers limit their addresses by them. In fact, a two-minute glass is still employed in the House of Commons and until 1839 the British Navy measured the watch on shipboard by a glass that ran an hour and a half. The marking off of time in such definite lengths as this, however, did not take place in ancient times. At that period people seldom attempted fine measurements of the day. The problem of hours, minutes, seconds, and fractions of them was something they scarcely dreamed of. Nor did they need to cut their time up into such small parts. Life, as I before remarked, was not very rushing. Nobody expected to meet anybody else at a particular instant in those far-away, lazy, easy-going times, or to go anywhere on the minute. If you arrived at where you were going before the darkness fell that was all even the most ambitious asked. The splitting up of time with our present-day nicety is of comparatively modern working out."