A portly citizen was talking to the sacristan. "I hear many objections to that bird, sir," he remarked to me, "from fastidious tourists: one thinks that a peacock, spreading its jewels by mechanism, would have a richer effect. Another says that a swan, perpetually wrestling with its dying song, would be more poetical. Others, in the light of late events, would prefer a phoenix." The dress of the stout citizen announced a sedentary man rather than a cosmopolitan. He had a shirt-front much hardened with starch; a white waistcoat, like an alabaster carving, which pushed his shirt away up round his ears; and a superb bluebottle-colored coat, with metal buttons. It was the costume of a stay-at-home, and I learned afterward that he was a local professor of geography and political science--the first by day, the last at night only in beer-gardens and places of resort. [Illustration: THE HIGHEST SPIRE IN EUROPE.] "Nay," I said, "the barnyard bird is of all others the fittest for a timepiece: he chants the hours for the whole country-side, and an old master of English song has called him Nature's 'crested clock.'" "With all deference," said the bourgeois, "I would still have a substitute provided for yonder cock. I would set up the Strasburg goose. Is he not our emblem, and is not our commerce swollen by the inflation of the _foie gras_? In one compartment I would show him fed with sulphur-water to increase his biliary secretion; another might represent his cage, so narrow that the pampered creature cannot even turn round on his stomach for exercise; another division might be anatomical, and present the martyr opening his breast, like some tortured saint, to display his liver, enlarged to the weight of three pounds; while the apex might be occupied by the glorified, gander in person, extending his neck and commenting on the sins of the Strasburg pastry-cooks with a cutting and sardonic hiss." You have not forgotten, reader, the legend of the old clock?