This custom of watch-decoration continued more or less through the eighteenth century, and even into the nineteenth, although, by that time, watches had, as we shall see, become excellent timepieces. The story is told that when Dresden was captured by the Prussians in 1757, they found in the wardrobe of Count Bruhl, the Saxon Minister, a different suit of clothes for every day in the year; each had a watch, stick, and snuff-box, appropriately decorated, as part of each one. Shakespeare never regarded a watch seriously. In _Love's Labour's Lost_ he compares a woman to _A German clock, Still a-repairing, ever out of frame, And never going aright, being a watch—_ A century after Shakespeare's day, Doctor Johnson remarked that a dictionary was like a watch: "The worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true." And Pope says in the same vein: _'Tis with our judgments as our watches—none Go just alike, yet each believes his own._ [Illustration: THE "NUREMBURG EGG," THE FIRST REAL WATCH _"Out of a little iron, Peter Henlein constructs clocks which ... can be carried in the pocket."—so wrote Johannes Coeleus, in 1511._] All of this reminds one of Dickens' famous character, Cap'n Cuttle, whose watch was evidently of the old school. Readers of _Dombey and Son_ may remember how "the Captain drew Walter into a corner, and with a great effort, that made his face very red, pulled up the silver watch, which was so big and so tight in his pocket that it came out like a bung. "Wal'r," said the Captain, handing it over and shaking him heartily by the hand, "a parting gift, my lad. Put it back half an hour every morning and another quarter toward afternoon and it's a watch that'll do you credit."" The old idea of regarding the watch as a trinket rather than as a timepiece, as an expensive toy rather than as an accurate and necessary mechanism, has come down to us from the days when a watch was ornamented outside, because it could not be really useful within. Even now, in spite of the modern demand for accurate timekeeping, that attitude has not entirely died away, as is shown by the expression "gold watch" and "silver watch." Of course, there are really no such things; there are merely gold and silver _cases_ for _steel_, _brass_ and _nickel_ watches. Some people still continue this mistaken idea by thinking of a watch merely as jewelry, as a thing meant more for ornament than for use. CHAPTER NINE _How a Mechanical Toy Became a Scientific Timepiece_