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It is great fun to watch for the little bird and hear its soft notes. Perhaps you wonder what makes the bird come out at just the right time. It is done by certain machinery inside the clock. But, however it is, old people as well as children seem to enjoy the cuckoo-clocks of Germany. "Some day, when you are older, you shall go to the fair at Easter time," Bertha's father has promised her.
Another makes toy tables, and still another dolls' chairs. Bertha often visits a little friend who helps her father make cuckoo-clocks. Did you ever see one of these curious clocks? As each hour comes around, a little bird comes outside the case. Then it flaps its wings and sings "cuckoo" in a soft, sweet voice as many times as there are strokes to the hour.
But really, my dear little nephew, I hope the time will soon come when you can pay me a long visit. As for the clock, you will have to stay in front of it all night as well as all day, if you are to see all it can show you." "I know about cuckoo-clocks, of course," said Gretchen, "but the little bird is the only figure that comes out on those.
Against the walls, which were as dark in colour as the mashrebeeyeh work, there were a number of carved brackets, on which were placed various extremely common things cheap and gaudy vases from Naples and Paris, two more Swiss cuckoo-clocks, a third clock with a blue and white china face and a back that looked as if were made of brass, a musical-box, and a grotesque monster, like a dragon with a dog's head, in rough yellow and blue earthenware.
The man who had bought the cuckoo-clocks and the cheap vases, who had set the gilded ball dancing upon the water of the faskeeyeh, who had broken the dim harmony of the colours in his resting-place by the introduction of that orange hue which seemed to reflect certain fierce lights within his nature, walked hand-in-hand with the shrewd money-maker, the determined pleasure-seeker, the sensual dreamer, the acute diplomatist.
Later in the day, let the King visit the National Gallery a hall filled with picture post-cards of the most picturesque spots in Switzerland; and thence let him be conducted to the principal factory of cuckoo-clocks, and, after some of the clocks have been made to strike, be heard remarking to the President, with a hearty laugh, that the sound is like that of the cuckoo.
It was absurd that a man, who was at least half child she thought of the cuckoo-clocks, the gilded dancing-ball should baffle her. If only she called upon her powers, she must be able to turn him inside out like one of her long gloves. She would do it to-day. And before he had replied to her question she had left it. "Who cares for such things on the Nile?" she said. She laughed.
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