"Usually they do, but Thomas Tompion well merited the honor due him, I assure you. To begin with, he was no ordinary tradesman. He was a person of culture who all his life associated with the foremost philosophers and mathematicians of his day. So widely was his ability recognized that he was made leading watchmaker to the court of Charles II. Now, although timekeepers had vastly improved, they were still pretty faulty, experimental contrivances, whose outside trappings counted with the public far more than did their interior mechanism. Tompion changed all this. Seizing upon all that was good offered by the inventors preceding him, he carefully re-proportioned the various parts and produced English clocks and watches that were at once the pride and despair of his brother craftsmen. Watches were something of an avocation with him, for his primary trade was in clocks, to which for many years he devoted his entire labor. Probably, however, the problems a watch presented won his interest and led him to try his skill in this new field, with the result that he was soon making watches that as far surpassed his associates' as did his clocks. He made a watch for the king, the fame of which traveled to France and prompted the Dauphin to order two like it. These watches all had two balances and balance springs fashioned after the scheme Hooke had worked out. They also, like most of Tompion's timekeepers, had an hour and a minute hand. One more innovation which he presented (and it was a very practical one) was the numbering of his watch movements for purposes of identification--a plan very generally followed since by present-day workmen. And yet all this which I have told you does not give you half an idea of what Tompion really was." McPhearson paused thoughtfully. "Thomas Tompion stood for something more than any of these things. He was a genuine lover of his art, and when we see or read of the many kinds of clocks and watches he produced, we cannot but feel the joy he had in making them. He made, for example, a marvellous clock that would run a year without winding, which William III had in his bedroom at Kensington Palace, it having been left to him by the Earl of Leicester. This clock, although small, struck the hours and quarter-hours, and was of ebony with silver mountings. And to prove to you that it was no novelty timepiece to be used merely for ornament, I will tell you that now, after a hundred and fifty years, it is still running and faithfully doing its duty." "Who owns it?" queried Christopher. "It has for a century and a half been in the possession of the family of Lord Mostyn and so famous has been its history that this nobleman has kept the names of those who have wound it during the last hundred years." "All sorts of bigwigs, I suppose," put in Christopher. "A list of celebrated persons, you may be sure." "Was Ebenezer on it?" Christopher chuckled mischievously.