"I suppose I do," the old man confessed. "Clocks have come to be almost people to me; in fact, some of them are a good sight better than people. By that, I mean they have finer traits. They go quietly ahead and do their work without bluster or complaint. When they don't it is usually because something's the matter with them. They are patient, faithful, useful, and were they to be taken out of the world they would be terribly missed and would leave it a pretty higgledy-piggledy place." "I guess there is no danger of the world being without clocks," returned Christopher comfortably. "There seem to be plenty to go round." "But there weren't always plenty," broke in McPhearson quickly. "You chance to live in a fortunate age, young man, and do not half appreciate your blessings. Had you lived a few hundred years ago you would have had no clocks." "Mercy on us! Why, how on earth did people manage to get on without them?" "Primitive persons studied the sun and calculated by that," McPhearson responded. "Then some ingenious creature thought out the sundial whereby the hour could be gauged by a shadow; also marks were made where the sun would strike at a given time--perhaps at noon. Such a notch was called the noon mark." "Oh, gee! But suppose there was no sun?" "Exactly! Now you have put your finger on the pulse of the dilemma! What was to be done when there was no sun? The sundial at best was none too correct. In different latitudes, too, different markings were needed. Moreover, a sundial, to be of practical value, had to be kept steady. What was to happen on shipboard? On cloudy days? At night?" "The sundial was about as much good as a fan would be in Greenland," grinned Christopher. "Yes, just about. It was these sunless hours that were the problem." "Humph! I never thought of that in my life." "Most of us don't." "I suppose that was why people began making clocks." "You don't for a moment imagine men leaped from sundials to clocks, do you?" interrogated the Scotchman quizzically. "Oh, perhaps not such nice ones as ours," conceded the boy with easy unconcern. "Still they had to tell time somehow." "Clocks were a long way off from suns and shadows." "But what did come next?" "To sundials, you mean? Well, for a long, long time people could think of nothing better. They introduced trifling remedies now and then, however. For example, in the seventeenth century they evolved a portable dial that could be carried from place to place. Sometimes this was combined with a compass; sometimes it was made in the form of a ring. It was an awkward substitute for the watch, but it was, nevertheless, great-great-great-grandfather to it. Yet advantageous as it was to be able to carry the time about with you, it did nothing to lessen the long, unmarked stretch of darkness that descended upon the earth every night. How was man to solve that difficulty?" "How indeed?"