"Sir," replied Graham, "it is a watch which I have made and regulated myself; take it with you wherever you please. If after seven years you come back to see me, and can tell me there has been a difference of five minutes, I will return you your money." Seven years passed, and the gentleman returned. "Sir," said he, "I bring you back your watch." "I remember," said Graham, "our conditions. Let me see the watch. Well, what do you complain of?" "Why," was the reply, "I have had it seven years, and there is a difference of more than five minutes." "Indeed!" said Graham. "In that case I return you your money." "I would not part with my watch," said the gentleman, "for ten times the sum I paid for it." "And I," rejoined Graham, "would not break my word for any consideration." He insisted on taking back the watch, which ever after he used as a regulator. This is a very good story, and is doubtless substantially true; but no watch was ever yet made which has varied as little as five minutes in seven years. Readers may remember that the British government once offered a reward of twenty thousand pounds sterling for the best chronometer, and the prize was awarded to Harrison for a chronometer which varied two minutes in a sailing voyage from England to Jamaica and back. George Graham died in 1751, aged seventy-six years, universally esteemed as an ornament of his age and country. In Westminster Abbey, among the tombs of poets, philosophers, and statesmen, may be seen the graves of the two clock-makers, master and apprentice, Tompion and Graham. JOHN HARRISON, EXQUISITE WATCH-MAKER. He was first a carpenter, and the son of a carpenter, born and reared in English Yorkshire, in a village too insignificant to appear on any but a county map. Faulby is about twenty miles from York, and there John Harrison was born in 1693, when William and Mary reigned in England. He was thirty-five years of age before he was known beyond his own neighborhood. He was noted there, however, for being a most skillful workman. There is, perhaps, no trade in which the degrees of skill are so far apart as that of carpenter. The difference is great indeed between the clumsy-fisted fellow who knocks together a farmer's pig-pen, and the almost artist who makes a dining-room floor equal to a piece of mosaic. Dr. Franklin speaks with peculiar relish of one of his young comrades in Philadelphia, as "the most exquisite joiner" he had ever known. It was not only in carpentry that John Harrison reached extraordinary skill and delicacy of stroke. He became an excellent machinist, and was particularly devoted from an early age to clock-work. He was a student also in the science of the day. A contemporary of Newton, he made himself capable of understanding the discoveries of that great man, and of following the Transactions of the Royal Society in mathematics, astronomy, and natural philosophy.