r Uncle Sam!" laughed the boy.

"Rather I say hurrah for the fellows who fought his watch battle for
him," was McPhearson's somewhat curt retort. "For the watch business has
never been one easy of development. You can blunder along and turn out
poor, carelessly made stuff in certain lines of trade and get by with
it. The public does not always know a good product from a bad one, and
all except the expert can be easily fooled. But a watch proclaims its
own worth. It has to go and has to keep accurate time or all the world
will know it. If it fails to do the work it was bought to do, people
won't buy it. Therefore that these results may be reached and a
satisfactory article put on the market there must be money enough to
house a large plant, pay skilled and high-priced workmen, supply the
best of material, and tempt into the industry men of brains. Many a
watch venture has gone on the rocks for the lack of these assets.

"Once on its feet, however, a well-manned American watch concern has all
it can do. It need have no qualms about foreign rivalry, for no European
country has ever yet been able to build up a factory system that could
touch that of the United States, either in quality or quantity of
output. As a result most nations have given over trying to. Our watches
can be made cheaper and hence in greater numbers than those of other
lands, and we now practically control the watch market. The era when a
few watches were made by hand and afterward sent to a local astronomer
or distant observatory to be tested out has passed. Even before the
United States Naval Observatory was established the Waltham Watch
Company had an observatory of its own. Now we have graduated even beyond
that point and each noon the official time is telegraphed or broadcast
from Arlington to all parts of the country."

"We do whizz ahead, don't we?" meditated Christopher, absently twirling
between his fingers a screw he had picked up from McPhearson's bench.

"I should say we did," was the enthusiastic reply. "That screw, for
instance! In the infancy of watchmaking it took a good factory worker a
whole day to make from eight to twelve hundred screws. This seems a vast
number until you recall that each watch requires from thirty to fifty of
these small articles. At that rate, you see, it would not take long to
use up all the screws a mechanic could turn out. Now, so marvelous has
machinery become, that a single operator can tend half a dozen or m