ion, but there is."

He made me put on the trumpet again, and, having set the machine going,
told me to press on a certain knob, at first gently, afterward as hard
as I pleased. I did so, and found that the effect of the "skipper," as
he called the knob, was to quicken the utterance of the phonograph in
proportion to the pressure to at least tenfold the usual rate of speed,
while at any moment, if a word of interest caught the ear, the ordinary
rate of delivery was resumed, and by another adjustment the machine
could be made to go back and repeat as much as desired.

When I told Hamage of my experience of the night before with the talking
clock in my room, he laughed uproariously.

"I am very glad you mentioned this just now," he said, when he had
quieted himself. "We have a couple of hours before the train goes out to
my place, and I 'll take you through Orton's establishment, where they
make a specialty of these talking clocks. I have a number of them in
my house, and, as I don't want to have you scared to death in the
night-watches, you had better get some notion of what clocks nowadays
are expected to do."

Orton's, where we found ourselves half an hour later, proved to be a
very extensive establishment, the firm making a specialty of horological
novelties, and particularly of the new phonographic timepieces.
The manager, who was a personal friend of Hamage's, and proved very
obliging, said that the latter were fast driving the old-fashioned
striking clocks out of use.

"And no wonder," he exclaimed; "the old-fashioned striker was an
unmitigated nuisance. Let alone the brutality of announcing the hour
to a refined household by four, eight, or ten rude bangs, without
introduction or apology, this method of announcement was not even
tolerably intelligible. Unless you happened to be attentive at the
moment the din began, you could never be sure of your count of strokes
so as to be positive whether it was eight, nine, ten, or eleven. As
to the half and quarter strokes, they were wholly useless unless you
chanced to know what was the last hour struck. And then, too, I should
like to ask you why, in the name of common sense, it should take twelve
times as long to tell you it is twelve o'clock as it does to tell you it
is one."

The manager laughed as heartily as Hamage had done on learning of my
scare of the night before.

"It was lucky for you," he said, "that the clock in your room happened
to be a simple time