announcer, otherwise you might easily have been
startled half out of your wits." I became myself quite of the same
opinion by the time he had shown us something of his assortment of
clocks. The mere announcing of the hours and quarters of hours was the
simplest of the functions of these wonderful and yet simple instruments.
There were few of them which were not arranged to "improve the time,"
as the old-fashioned prayer-meeting phrase was. People's ideas differing
widely as to what constitutes improvement of time, the clocks varied
accordingly in the nature of the edification they provided. There were
religious and sectarian clocks, moral clocks, philosophical clocks,
free-thinking and infidel clocks, literary and poetical clocks,
educational clocks, frivolous and bacchanalian clocks. In the religious
clock department were to be found Catholic, Presbyterian, Methodist,
Episcopal, and Baptist time-pieces, which, in connection with the
announcement of the hour and quarter, repeated some tenet of the sect
with a proof text. There were also Talmage clocks, and Spurgeon clocks,
and Storrs clocks, and Brooks clocks, which respectively marked the
flight of time by phrases taken from the sermons of these eminent
divines, and repeated in precisely the voice and accents of the original
delivery. In startling proximity to the religious department I was shown
the skeptical clocks. So near were they, indeed, that when, as I stood
there, the various time-pieces announced the hour of ten, the war
of opinions that followed was calculated to unsettle the firmest
convictions. The observations of an Ingersoll which stood near me were
particularly startling. The effect of an actual wrangle was the greater
from the fact that all these individual clocks were surmounted by
effigies of the authors of the sentiments they repeated.

I was glad to escape from this turmoil to the calmer atmosphere of the
philosophical and literary clock department. For persons with a taste
for antique moralizing, the sayings of Plato, Epictetus, and Marcus
Aurelius had here, so to speak, been set to time. Modern wisdom was
represented by a row of clocks surmounted by the heads of famous
maxim-makers, from Rochefoucauld to Josh Billings. As for the literary
clocks, their number and variety were endless. All the great authors
were represented. Of the Dickens clocks alone there were half a dozen,
with selections from his greatest stories. When I suggested that,
capti