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As the sound of the bells died away, the last drop of water fell from the clepsydra and marked the hour of midnight. Then the furnace opened and showed the glowing crucible, which burst with a terrible noise, and threw out a gigantic flame that reached the sky through the torn roof. Sylvestre Ker, enveloped by the fire, fell prostrate on the ground, suffocated in the burning smoke.
Between the inner and outer courtyard were two sets of heavier doors and two equally heavy were at the street entrance of the outer courtyard. On the stair-landing was the chained-up porter-accountant seated under the window on a backless stool by a small, heavy accountant's table on which stood a tall clepsydra by his big account-book.
"Yes or half-hour, quarter-hour any fraction of an hour you choose. The idea of the sand glass was not entirely new, because some form of running sand had long before been used in the Far East. But the sand glass as we know it was new to the European world, and you cannot but agree it was a far more practical article than was the clepsydra for it neither froze nor had to be replenished.
He finds in one of the tablets a phrase which he interprets to mean measure-governor, and he infers from this the existence of a kind of a calculator. He calls attention also to the fact that Sextus Empiricus states that the clepsydra was known to the Chaldeans, and that Herodotus asserts that the Greeks borrowed certain measures of time from the Babylonians.
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