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With The Eyes Shut
by
While I was thus delightfully engaged, I was not less delightfully interrupted by Hamage, who, having arrived at the hotel, and learned that I was in the breakfast-room, came in and sat down beside me. After telling him how much I admired the new sort of newspapers, I offered one criticism, which was that there seemed to be no way by which one could skip dull paragraphs or uninteresting details.
“The invention would, indeed, be very far from a success,” he said, “if there were no such provision, 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 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.