I marched to the cathedral, determined to ascend, and when I saw the look of it changed my mind.

The sacristan, in fact, advised me not to go up after he had taken my fee and obtained a view of my proportions over the tube of his key, which he pretended to whistle into.  We sat down together as I recovered my breath, after which I wandered through the nave with my guide, admiring the statue of the original architect, who stands looking at the interior—­a kind of Wren “circumspecting” his own monument.  At high noon the twelve apostles come out from the famous horologe and take up their march, and chanticleer, on one of the summits of the clock-case, opens his brazen throat and crows loud enough to fill the farthest recesses of the church with his harsh alarum.

A portly citizen was talking to the sacristan.  “I hear many objections to that bird, sir,” he remarked to me, “from fastidious tourists:  one thinks that a peacock, spreading its jewels by mechanism, would have a richer effect.  Another says that a swan, perpetually wrestling with its dying song, would be more poetical.  Others, in the light of late events, would prefer a phoenix.”

The dress of the stout citizen announced a sedentary man rather than a cosmopolitan.  He had a shirt-front much hardened with starch; a white waistcoat, like an alabaster carving, which pushed his shirt away up round his ears; and a superb bluebottle-colored coat, with metal buttons.  It was the costume of a stay-at-home, and I learned afterward that he was a local professor of geography and political science—­the first by day, the last at night only in beer-gardens and places of resort.

[Illustration:  The highest spire in Europe.]

“Nay,” I said, “the barnyard bird is of all others the fittest for a timepiece:  he chants the hours for the whole country-side, and an old master of English song has called him Nature’s ‘crested clock.’”

“With all deference,” said the bourgeois, “I would still have a substitute provided for yonder cock.  I would set up the Strasburg goose.  Is he not our emblem, and is not our commerce swollen by the inflation of the foie gras?  In one compartment I would show him fed with sulphur-water to increase his biliary secretion; another might represent his cage, so narrow that the pampered creature cannot even turn round on his stomach for exercise; another division might be anatomical, and present the martyr opening his breast, like some tortured saint, to display his liver, enlarged to the weight of three pounds; while the apex might be occupied by the glorified, gander in person, extending his neck and commenting on the sins of the Strasburg pastry-cooks with a cutting and sardonic hiss.”

You have not forgotten, reader, the legend of the old clock?