Yet there is interest enough in the work. There is the charm which always attaches to work of precision, the delight of using delicate and exact instruments, and of obtaining results of steadily increasing perfection. It may be akin to the sporting passion for record-breaking, but surely it is a noble form of it which has led the assistants, in recent years, to steadily increase the number of observations in a normal night's work up to the very limit, taking care the while that their accuracy has in no degree suffered. In longitude work also 'the better is the enemy of the good,' and there is the ambition that each fresh determination shall be markedly more precise than all that have preceded it. The constant care of chronometers soon reveals a kind of individuality in them which forms a fresh source of interest, whilst if a man has but a spark of imagination, how easily he will wrap them round with a halo of romance! Glance through the ledgers, and you will see how some of them have heard the guns at the siege of Alexandria, others have been carried far into the frozen north, others have wandered with Livingstone or Cameron in the trackless forests of equatorial Africa. More striking still are those pages across which the closing line has been drawn; never again will the time-keeper there scheduled return to the kindly inquisition of Flamsteed Hill. This sailed away in the Wasp, and was swallowed up in the eastern typhoon; that went down in the sudden squall that smote the Eurydice off the Isle of Wight; these foundered with the Captain. The last fatal journey of Sir John Franklin to find the North-West Passage leaves its record here; the chronometers of the Erebus and Terror will never again appear on the Greenwich muster roll. Land exploration claims its victims too. Sturt's ill-fated expedition across Australia, and Livingstone's last wandering, are represented. [Illustration: 'LOST IN THE BIRKENHEAD.'] Sometimes an amusing entry interrupts the silent pathos of these closed pages. 'Lost by Mr. Smith on the coast of Africa,' reads at first sight like a rather thin attempt of some one to shift the responsibility of his own carelessness on to the broad shoulders of Mr. Nobody. In reality it probably gives a hint of the necessary, dangerous, and exciting work of slave-dhow chasing which gives employment to our ships on the African coast. 'Mr. Smith' was no doubt a petty officer who was told off to carry the chronometer for a boat's crew sent to search for a slave-dhow up some equatorial estuary. Probably the dhow was found, and the Arabs who manned it gave so stout a resistance that 'Mr. Smith' and his men had other things to do than take care of chronometers before they could overcome them. We may take it that the real story outlined here was one of courage and hard fighting, not of carelessness and shirking.