ed with singular distaste at the stiff and regular
processes of ordinary machinery. Being once carried to see a
steam-engine, in the expectation that his intuitive comprehension of
mechanical principles would be gratified, he turned pale and grew sick,
as if something monstrous and unnatural had been presented to him. This
horror was partly owing to the size and terrible energy of the iron
laborer; for the character of Owen's mind was microscopic, and tended
naturally to the minute, in accordance with his diminutive frame and
the marvellous smallness and delicate power of his fingers. Not that
his sense of beauty was thereby diminished into a sense of prettiness.
The beautiful idea has no relation to size, and may be as perfectly
developed in a space too minute for any but microscopic investigation
as within the ample verge that is measured by the arc of the rainbow.
But, at all events, this characteristic minuteness in his objects and
accomplishments made the world even more incapable than it might
otherwise have been of appreciating Owen Warland's genius. The boy's
relatives saw nothing better to be done--as perhaps there was not--than
to bind him apprentice to a watchmaker, hoping that his strange
ingenuity might thus be regulated and put to utilitarian purposes.

Peter Hovenden's opinion of his apprentice has already been expressed.
He could make nothing of the lad. Owen's apprehension of the
professional mysteries, it is true, was inconceivably quick; but he
altogether forgot or despised the grand object of a watchmaker's
business, and cared no more for the measurement of time than if it had
been merged into eternity. So long, however, as he remained under his
old master's care, Owen's lack of sturdiness made it possible, by
strict injunctions and sharp oversight, to restrain his creative
eccentricity within bounds; but when his apprenticeship was served out,
and he had taken the little shop which Peter Hovenden's failing
eyesight compelled him to relinquish, then did people recognize how
unfit a person was Owen Warland to lead old blind Father Time along his
daily course. One of his most rational projects was to connect a
musical operation with the machinery of his watches, so that all the
harsh dissonances of life might be rendered tuneful, and each flitting
moment fall into the abyss of the past in golden drops of harmony. If a
family clock was intrusted to him for repair,--one of those tall,
ancient clocks that