Factory facilities producing an average of twenty thousand accurate watches a day; distribution facilities including the cooperation of a _voluntary_ "chain-store system" of more than one hundred thousand independent retailers, all operating upon a common plan and under common prices; a product that has come into the most wide-spread use not only throughout the United States but in the farthest regions of the inhabited earth—which has, in fact, in itself served to turn back the tide by which watches formerly flowed from Europe into America, so that it now proceeds from our shores toward those of Europe and other lands; a name which has become as well known as any in commercial and industrial life, and better than all, the appreciable raising of the efficiency of the human race through universally promoting the watch-carrying habit and putting fifty million timepieces into service. It is altogether an Aladdin tale of modern business. CHAPTER EIGHTEEN _The End of the Journey_ Did you ever, at the end of a journey—perhaps across water, or up to the top of some high hill—look backward to the place from whence you came, and wonder that it seemed so far away? Now as we have completed our journey together through the history of man's struggle to gain knowledge and control over time, we are impressed with the great contrast between Time as it was to mankind in the beginning, and Time as it is to us to-day. The caveman, with whom we began this story, lived close to nature, taking his sense of time from her as he took all else. Morning was when the light came, and he waked and was hungry; noon was when the sun was highest, and night was the time of lengthened shadows and the state of darkness. We see these same things, but, for us, they have not the same meanings. We count the time by hours and minutes, and we reckon these by machines which we have made, called clocks and watches. These mean so much more to us that, when we set all the clocks forward another hour to save daylight, it seemed to us as if we had changed the actual time. It was practically as if we had performed the miracle of Joshua, who in Bible story, made the sun stand still, or the miracle of Isaiah, who made the shadow go back ten steps on the dial of Ahaz. After a few days, we did not feel as if we had set the clocks; we felt as if we had made the sun wait for us, and the very day come earlier. And so it is with the seasons. The caveman called it spring when the swallows came, and autumn when the leaves changed their color. But we judge of these things by the calendar; we say that the spring "is very late this year," or that the "leaves are beginning to turn early." We have a proverb that one swallow does not make a summer; no, nor do all the swallows, so far as we moderns are concerned. It is summer for us upon a certain day, no matter what the swallows do, but for the caveman, summer was when the swallows came, whenever that might be.