the inn; and at first some awkward attempts were made to
heal the breach. But Captain Jeremy's scowl and the light in Captain
John's green eyes soon convinced the busybodies that they were
playing with fire, and likely to burn their fingers.

In his home Captain Runacles grew restless. To cure this, he set to
work and finished a large dial which he had long intended to present
to the Corporation of Harwich, to set up over the town-gate.
The Corporation accepted the gift and employed their clerk to write a
letter of thanks. The language of this letter was so flattering that
Captain Runacles made another dial for the Exchange. Being thanked
for this also, he presented an excellent pendulum clock of his own
making, to be placed over his Majesty's arms upon the principal gate
of the dockyard, with a bell above the clock to strike the hours of
the day, as well as to summon the men to their work; and two more
dials, the one for the new town-hall, the other for the almshouses
near St. Helen's Port. Again the Corporation thanked him as
profusely as before, but asked him to be at the expense of affixing
these dials, which, both by their beauty and number, were rapidly
making Harwich unique among towns of its size. Upon this Captain
Runacles, in a huff, forswore all further munificence, and applied
himself to the construction of a pair of compasses capable of
dividing an inch into a thousand parts, and to the sinking of a well
in the marsh behind his pavilion. The design of this well was
extremely ingenious. It was worked by means of a wheel, nine feet in
diameter, with steps in its circumference like those of a treadmill,
and so weighted that by walking upon it, as if up a flight of stairs,
a person of eleven or twelve stone would draw up a bucket--two
buckets being so hung, at the ends of a rope surrounding the wheel,
that while one ascended, full of water, the other, which was empty,
sank down and was refilled. These buckets being too heavy for a man
to overturn to pour out the water, he bored a hole in each, and
contrived to plug the holes so that the weight of the bucket as it
bumped upon the trough prepared for it at the well's edge jogged out
the plug and sent the water running down the trough into whatever
pail or vessel stood ready to catch it. Nor is it astonishing that
he lost his temper when, after these preparations, he found the well
was not deep enough, and the water as much infected with brine as if
he