ht of time. It hangs on a leafless mossy
oak snag showing the effect of time, and on the snath is written, "All
flesh is grass." This, especially the inscription, rather pleased
father, and, of course, mother and all my sisters and brothers admired
it. Like the first it indicates the days of the week and month, starts
fires and beds at any given hour and minute, and, though made more
than fifty years ago, is still a good timekeeper.

My mind still running on clocks, I invented a big one like a town
clock with four dials, with the time-figures so large they could be
read by all our immediate neighbors as well as ourselves when at work
in the fields, and on the side next the house the days of the week and
month were indicated. It was to be placed on the peak of the barn
roof. But just as it was all but finished, father stopped me, saying
that it would bring too many people around the barn. I then asked
permission to put it on the top of a black-oak tree near the house.
Studying the larger main branches, I thought I could secure a
sufficiently rigid foundation for it, while the trimmed sprays and
leaves would conceal the angles of the cabin required to shelter the
works from the weather, and the two-second pendulum, fourteen feet
long, could be snugly encased on the side of the trunk. Nothing about
the grand, useful timekeeper, I argued, would disfigure the tree, for
it would look something like a big hawk's nest. "But that," he
objected, "would draw still bigger bothersome trampling crowds about
the place, for who ever heard of anything so queer as a big clock on
the top of a tree?" So I had to lay aside its big wheels and cams and
rest content with the pleasure of inventing it, and looking at it in
my mind and listening to the deep solemn throbbing of its long
two-second pendulum with its two old axes back to back for the bob.

One of my inventions was a large thermometer made of an iron rod,
about three feet long and five eighths of an inch in diameter, that
had formed part of a wagon-box. The expansion and contraction of this
rod was multiplied by a series of levers made of strips of hoop iron.
The pressure of the rod against the levers was kept constant by a
small counterweight, so that the slightest change in the length of the
rod was instantly shown on a dial about three feet wide multiplied
about thirty-two thousand times. The zero-point was gained by packing
the rod in wet snow. The scale was so large that the bi