Travel Stories Retold from St. Nicholas — John Shaqi
Travel Stories Retold from St. NicholasVarious
General
Travel Stories Retold from St. Nicholas
Various
Voyages and travels -- Juvenile literature
In very recent days, the clock of the City Hall in Olmütz, also
renovated, has become a rival to that of the Strassburg Cathedral. In
the year 1560, it was described by a traveler as a true marvel,
together with the Strassburg clock and that of the Marienkirche in
Dantzic. But as the years passed, it was most inconceivably neglected,
and everything movable and portable about it was carried off. Now,
after repairs which have been almost the same as constructing it anew,
it works almost faultlessly. In the lower part of the clock is the
calendar, with the day of the year, month, and week, and the phases of
the moon, together with the astronomical plate; a story higher, a large
number of figures move around a group of angels, and here is also a
good portrait of the Empress Maria Theresa. Still higher is an
arrangement of symbolical figures and decorations, which worthily
crowns the whole. A youth and a man, above at the left, announce the
hours and quarters by blows of a hammer. The other figures go through
their motions at noonday. Scarcely have the blows of the man's hammer
ceased to sound, when a shepherd boy, in another wing of the clock,
begins to play a tune; he has six different pieces, which can be
alternated. As soon as he has finished, the chimes, sixteen bells,
begin, and the figures of St. George, of Rudolph of Hapsburg, with a
priest, and of Adam and Eve, appear in the left center. When they have
disappeared, the chimes ring their second melody, and the figures of
the right center appear,--the three Kings of the East, before the
enthroned Virgin, and the Holy Family on the Flight into Egypt. When
the bells ring for the third time, all the figures show themselves once
more.
Clocks operated by electricity are, of course, the product of recent
times.
England's largest electric clock was, as our illustration shows,
recently christened in a novel manner. The makers, Messrs. Gent & Co.,
of Leicester, entertained about seventy persons at luncheon on this
occasion, using one of the four mammoth dials as a dining-table, a
"time table," as the guests facetiously styled it.
The clock was installed, 220 feet above the ground, in the tower of the
Royal Liverpool Society's new building, in Liverpool. Each of the four
dials, which weigh fifteen tons together, measure twenty-five feet in
diameter, with a minute-hand fourteen feet long. The hands are actuated
electrically by a master clock connected with the Greenwich
Observatory. After dark, they are illuminated by electricity, and are
visible at a great distance.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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