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The obvious explanation that the man was a pickpocket, and that this was his plunder, was discounted by the fact that all six were of American make and of a type which is rare in England. Three of them bore the mark of the Rochester Watchmaking Company; one was by Mason, of Elmira; one was unmarked; and the small one, which was highly jewelled and ornamented, was from Tiffany, of New York.
Restless, ne'er-do-well, spendthrift, he wanders from factory to factory through the chain of watchmaking towns: Springfield, Trenton, Waltham, Lancaster, Waterbury, Chippewa. Usually expert, always unreliable, certainly fond of drink, Nap Ballou was typical of his kind. The steady worker had a mingled admiration and contempt for him. He, in turn, regarded the other as a stick-in-the-mud.
"Now," added he, "I have roughly sketched for you the tale of watchmaking in America. There is much more that might be related but you yourself, by using your eyes and ears, can fill in the gaps. Just remember this one fact that it was your own land that developed and brought to its present high grade of efficiency the factory system of making watches.
Fifty things occurred to her, and fifty were set aside. Her mother's immediate relatives in France were scattered or dead. There was no longer any interest at Chambery in the watchmaking exile, who had dropped like a cherry-stone from the beak of the blackbird of persecution upon one of the Iles de la Manche.
For a brief period, when there was a lull in the surveying business and his prospects of continuing in this profession looked uncertain, he tried watchmaking, and would probably though not by choice have been apprenticed to it but for an unexpected circumstance which caused his master to give up his business.
It ought to have been," cried young America fervently. "Yes, I agree with you. It certainly was a mistaken method for raising an income for the State. Once abolished, the industry slowly began to pick up again. Nevertheless, for all that, England never thrived at watchmaking as did France, Switzerland and our own nation.
He also stated that at Prescot a peculiar class of workmen has long been established, celebrated for their great skill in clock and watchmaking; and that, in his opinion, they were the direct descendants of a swarm of workmen from Hugo de Lupus's original Norman hive of refined metal-workers, dating from the time of the Conquest. To return to my narrative.
If a man was to take such a boy as I was, and attempt to make a watchmaker of him, the boy might, after an apprenticeship of five or seven years be able to take apart and put together a watch; but all through life he would be working uphill and seizing every excuse for leaving his work and idling away his time. Watchmaking is repulsive to him.
It seemed to him that he must have known such a room in some other world, where he had not had to make watches all day with a glass screwed in his eye, but had abundant leisure for books and beautiful things. Not but that there might be worse things than the watchmaking. Over the works of the watches, the fine little wheels and springs, Walter Gray thought hard, thought incessantly.
He then goes into town and looks about to see what he will do with Sammy. He returns home, and says: "Sammy, I see watchmaking is a nice, genteel business; I think I will make you a goldsmith." He does this, regardless of Sam's natural inclinations or genius. We are all, no doubt, born for a wise purpose. There is as much diversity in our brains as in our countenances.
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