Franker souls actually parade what may be termed their alarm-clockophilia. A friend of mine, one Carolus Dillingham, talks by the hour of his Nellie. Nellie is not, to the casual observer, an alarm clock of extraordinary merit. She was constructed many years ago and her nickel-plating is nearly gone. She is a small, weak-looking thing, with a great dome absolutely out of proportion to her rickety body. A result of her ridiculous construction is that when the alarm rings, she becomes slightly overbalanced, trembles, and moves a fraction of an inch forward on her feeble legs. This, according to Carolus, is her chief charm. "I put Nellie," he says, "on the very edge of the shelf by the foot of my bed. When she rings in the morning she topples off and lands on the blankets. So I don't need to get up and walk across the cold floor. I can just reach out and choke her. I think she is the most faithful alarm clock in the world." One little regarded virtue of the alarm clock is its sturdy democracy. It belongs irrevocably to the people, nothing can make it a snob. There is a watch for every rank; there are coarse peasant watches, fat bourgeois watches, and watches delicately aristocratic. But the alarm clock in the tenement of the laborer is the exact duplicate of that which wakens his employer; an alarm clock's an alarm clock for a' that. America will never really be a decadent nation until its alarm clocks are jeweled and soft-voiced. The captious critic may object that the reason for the plainness of alarm clocks is that their use is restricted to what is loosely called "the working class." There is some truth in this. Up to the present I have never witnessed the awaking of an aristocrat, or even of a captain of industry, but, I suppose that they are hailed in soft tones by liveried menials, who bring them golden trays absolutely overflowing with breakfast food and remarkably thick cream. But aristocrats and captains of industry are rare birds, and all other people must have alarm clocks. All other people, that is, who live in cities. For the alarm clock, in spite of its numerous excellences, is as inappropriate in the country as rouge on a milkmaid. The farmer must try to live up to his craft, and one of the aesthetic duties is to depend on mechanism as little as possible. His wife should rise when she hears the poultry saluting the dawn. Then, so nearly as I remember her obligations, she should go out on the front porch and blow a conchshell until her husband wakes up.