of the mail-coach guard, who brought the time from St. Paul’s as he started from St. Martin’s-le-Grand, and communicated it to the Cowfold mail-cart driver.  All round the shop were clocks of numerous patterns, but mostly of two types, one Dutch, and one with oak or mahogany case.  Perhaps a dozen or so were generally going, and it was rather distracting to a visitor to see the pendulums of the Dutch clocks wagging at different rates, some with excited haste, others with solemn gravity, and no two at the same speed.  Each seemed confident it was in direct communication with Greenwich Observatory, and paid not the slightest attention to the others.  It was seldom that the footpath in front of the watchmaker’s window was empty.  Generally a boy or girl stood there with nose flattened against the panes staring at Giacomo busied with his craft.  For it was a genuine mystery to the children, and he was a mysterious person in other ways.  Under his care was the church clock.  He went up into the tower, and into a great closet in which nobody else in Cowfold had ever been.  Furthermore, as an adjunct to the watchmaking, he repaired barometers and thermometers, and it is certain that not a farmer within ten miles of Cowfold knew what was at the back of the plate of his weather-glass.

How a man with such a name as Tacchi came to settle in Cowfold was never understood.  Giacomo’s father and mother appeared there about the beginning of the century:  a son was born within three years after their arrival, and is the Tacchi now before us.

It might have been supposed that his occupation would have inclined him to melancholy.  Far from it.  He was a brisk, active creature, about middle height, with jet black hair, and a quick circulation.  He was never overcome, as he might reasonably have been, with meditations on the flux of time.  He never rose in the morning saddened by the thought that the day would be just like the day before, or that the watches with which he had to deal would show just the same faults and just the same carelessness on the part of their possessors.  On the contrary, he always sprang out of bed with as much zest and buoyancy as if he were a Columbus confidently expecting that before noon the shores of a new world would rise over the ocean’s edge.

Giacomo, when he succeeded to the business, married the daughter of a small farmer in the neighbourhood.  It all came about through a couple of little oak wedges.  He took a tall clock home after it had been repaired, and as the floor of the living-room on which it stood was uneven, the front of the clock at the base was always wedged up to bring it perpendicular, and keep the top from overhanging.  He was obliged to ask Miriam, the eldest girl, to stand on a footstool, and push the clock towards the wall.  As she stretched her right arm up just under the little gilt cherub who expanded his wings above the dial, holding the frame with her left, he stepped back a little, and was suddenly struck with the beauty of her attitude.  A lovely line it was from the tips of her fingers down to her heel, and the slight strain just lifted the hem of her gown, and showed the whitest of white stockings, and a shapely foot.  Giacomo instantly fell in love.