ock for twenty-five dollars, he employed the
village carpenter to make a case for it, which might cost ten or fifteen
dollars more.

It was in this simple way that the country was supplied with those tall,
old-fashioned clocks, of which almost every ancient farm-house still
contains a specimen. The clock-case was sometimes built into the house
like a pillar, and helped to support the upper story. Some of them were
made by very clumsy workmen, out of the commonest timber, just planed in
the roughest way, and contained wood enough for a pretty good-sized
organ.

The clock business had fascinated Chauncey Jerome from his childhood,
and he longed to work at it. His guardian dissuaded him. So many clocks
were then making, he said, that in two or three years the whole country
would be supplied, and then there would be no more business for a maker.
This was the general opinion. At a training, one day, the boy overheard
a group talking of Eli Terry's _folly_ in undertaking to make two
hundred clocks all at once.

"He'll never live long enough to finish them," said one.

"If he should," said another, "he could not possibly sell so many. The
very idea is ridiculous."

The boy was not convinced by these wise men of the East, and he lived to
make and to sell two hundred thousand clocks in one year!

When his apprenticeship was a little more than half over, he told his
master that if he would give him four months in the winter of each year,
when business was dull, he would buy his own clothes. His master
consenting, he went to Waterbury, Connecticut, and began to work making
clock dials, and very soon got an insight into the art and mystery of
clock-making.

The clock-makers of that day, who carried round their clock-movements
upon a horse's back, often found it difficult to sell them in remote
country places, because there was no carpenter near by competent to make
a case. Two smart Yankees hired our apprentice to go with them to the
distant State of New Jersey, for the express purpose of making cases for
the clocks they sold. On this journey he first saw the city of New York.
He was perfectly astonished at the bustle and confusion. He stood on the
corner of Chatham and Pearl Streets for more than an hour, wondering why
so many people were hurrying about so in every direction.

"What is going on?" said he, to a passer-by. "What's the excitement
about?"

The man hurried on without noticing him; which led him to conclude t