"Oh, sometimes. I haven't lately because it hasn't happened to be necessary. Moreover, I have had a good deal to do right here. The fall is my season for trotting about. After houses have been closed all summer and owners have neglected their clocks, I have to go round and start them again. What a barbarous custom it is to let clocks run down and stand idle for months! Why, if asked to do so, we can always send reliable men into houses to wind the clocks and keep them regulated. It costs only a trifle and pays in the end, if people were only aware of it. A clock neither wants nor needs a rest. On the contrary it is never so happy as when it is ticking. The woman who stopped her clock nights so it should not be wearing out the works did it no kindness." A peal of appreciative laughter came from Christopher. McPhearson reached for a small traveling clock and unscrewed the back of it. "Humph!" sniffed he. "Solid with dirt! I'll wager it hasn't been cleaned for years. Still, it is expected to go all the same. If its owner had half that amount of dust in his eye he would be off to an oculist as fast as ever his feet would carry him. Such creatures do not deserve to have clocks. They should have lived when there weren't any." "Back in the thirteenth century, you mean?" queried Christopher, not unwilling to display his knowledge. "Oh, they were just beginning to get them by that time," McPhearson objected instantly. "By the fourteenth century there were clocks that really began to be clocks. In 1326, for example, the Abbott of St. Albans made a marvelous clock which not only showed the course of the sun and moon but the ebb and flow of the tide. In the meantime more big clocks began to be put up on the church towers. But remember, none of these could boast any nice degree of accuracy; it was many, many years later before the secrets of correct time-keeping were mastered. Nevertheless every little while a leap forward would be made, and one of these jumps came about 1340 when Peter Lightfoot, a monk, made for Glastonbury Abbey a clock with an escapement and regulator for securing equitable motion." Christopher, passing over the latter facts, seized upon the former. "Another monk!" cried he. The Scotchman nodded. "I told you it was the monks who packed their time the fullest and paid the greatest heed to the hours in those days." The boy did not answer immediately and when he did it was to venture politely: "I suppose _equitable motion_ was a fine thing." McPhearson peeped at him over the top of his glasses. "Have you any idea, laddie, what it was?" he interrogated. "Not the remotest," came frankly from Christopher. They both laughed. "Well, what I am talking about is our dead beat escapement." "And what might that be?" McPhearson became thoughtful.