cavern for a forge, a wind-draught for bellows, and a
stone for an anvil. In attempting, therefore, to take to pieces the
machinery, there was the risk of destroying it.

The attempt seemed at first sight wholly impracticable.

The apparent impossibility of the project rose before him like a stone
wall, blocking further progress.

What was to be done?

II

WHEREIN SHAKESPEARE AND AESCHYLUS MEET

Gilliatt had a notion.

Since the time of the carpenter-mason of Salbris, who, in the sixteenth
century, in the dark ages of science--long before Amontons had
discovered the first law of electricity, or Lahire the second, or
Coulomb the third--without other helper than a child, his son, with
ill-fashioned tools, in the chamber of the great clock of La
Charite-sur-Loire, resolved at one stroke five or six problems in
statics and dynamics inextricably intervolved like the wheels in a block
of carts and waggons--since the time of that grand and marvellous
achievement of the poor workman, who found means, without breaking a
single piece of wire, without throwing one of the teeth of the wheels
out of gear, to lower in one piece, by a marvellous simplification, from
the second story of the clock-tower to the first, that massive monitor
of the hours, made all of iron and brass, "large as the room in which
the man watches at night from the tower," with its motion, its
cylinders, its barrels, its drum, its hooks, and its weights, the barrel
of its spring steel-yard, its horizontal pendulum, the holdfasts of its
escapement, its reels of large and small chains, its stone weights, one
of which weighed five hundred pounds, its bells, its peals, its jacks
that strike the hours--since the days, I say, of the man who
accomplished this miracle, and of whom posterity knows not even the
name--nothing that could be compared with the project which Gilliatt was
meditating had ever been attempted.

The ponderousness, the delicacy, the involvement of the difficulties
were not less in the machinery of the Durande than in the clock of La
Charite-sur-Loire.

The untaught mechanic had his helpmate--his son; Gilliatt was alone.

A crowd gathered together from Meung-sur-Loire, from Nevers, and even
from Orleans, able at time of need to assist the mason of Salbris, and
to encourage him with their friendly voices. Gilliatt had around him no
voices but those of the wind; no crowd but the assemblage of waves.

There is nothing more remarkab