During the last half of the eighteenth century there was a great demand for moving figures to be placed in this arched top. Ships in motion, Father Time, etc., were always popular subjects, as well as painted disks showing the moon in her various phases. The moving figures were preferred by Dutch makers, who excelled at this species of work. The English makers, however, used the painted moon-disks the most. The French, with their taste for the ornamental and elegant, never liked the square-faced clocks. They preferred the small clocks in ebony or alabaster casings with ormolu mounts. Julien Le Roy was a very famous French clockmaker, whose works were mounted in florid style, sometimes in cases of kingwood, with inlay of lighter woods, or in ebony. Lepante made clocks dating from about 1750, and these were always in the best style and elegant taste. Few of such clocks found their way to America on account of their great cost. By the last quarter of the eighteenth century watches and clocks were quite common in the colonies, where they were also made. In the "Mercury" for May 2, 1774, not only were clocks offered for sale, but "watches neat and plain, gold, silver, shagreen, and metal. Some engraved and enamelled with devices new and elegant; also the first in this country of the small new-fashioned watches the circumference of a British shilling. John Sinnet removed to the Main St. called the Fly, next house to the corner of Beekman's slip, the sign of the dial against the wall." In this same year Basil Francis offers; "£1 reward for any information of a man who did in a fraudulent manner obtain one pinchbeck watch with a single case, winds up in the face, the hole where the key goes a little flowered." There were even higher rewards offered at this time for the return of lost watches, probably not "pinchbeck," for a "military gentleman offers £5 for the return of his watch and no questions asked." The English officers made the winter of 1778-9 very gay in New York, quite rivaling Philadelphia, and set the fashion, which was esteemed very polite, of wearing two watches. The Quaker City considered this custom ridiculous. Eli Terry, of Windsor, Conn., was one of the first clockmakers in the United States, though James Harrison began to manufacture at Waterbury, Conn., as early as 1790. The first clock he made was entered in his books, "January 1, 1791, at £3 12_s._ 8_d_". Yet clocks were made even earlier than this, for in 1783 the Assembly of Connecticut awarded a patent for fourteen years to Benjamin Hanks, of Litchfield, Conn., for a self-winding clock. It was to wind itself by the help of air.