"Do you mean to say they really christened clocks by that unearthly name?" asked Christopher incredulously.
"_Wag-on-the-wall?_ Yes, indeed. That was the term they went by. Pedlars carried them round on horseback, riding from house to house and jolting them over the bad roads until it is a seven-days' wonder they went at all," was McPhearson's retort.
"I never saw a clock of the sort," the lad mused.
"They are rare now. I suppose most of them were discarded years ago. You see, since they had no cases they probably became clogged with dirt and wore out much sooner than did the protected long-case clocks; moreover, as they were both cheap and commonplace, nobody thought of keeping them after something better was procurable. Who would dream of laying them aside and cherishing them because they might in years to come be curiosities of historic value? Americans never keep anything, you know. It is a seven-days' wonder how they ever chanced to possess any heirlooms at all."
Christopher smiled at the Scotchman's savage grumble.
"Thomas Harland made quite a few of these wags-on-the-wall as well as some fine long-case clocks with works of brass," added the old man.
"I suppose none of the makers could turn out very many clocks when every part of them had to be made by hand," was Christopher's thoughtful comment.
"No, they couldn't. Moreover the demand for clocks was not great. Usually clockmakers either started only three or four or else began none until they received advance orders. If eight or ten good clocks that would sell for thirty-five or forty dollars apiece were turned out inside a year, the output was held to be a pretty fair one."
"Nobody could get very rich on that income," came from the lad.
"Not if that rate of production had continued. But it didn't, you see. After Eli Terry got to making clocks somewhere about 1795 he was clever enough to carry water from a near-by brook into his shop and supplement his tools and hand engine with water power. That was a stride ahead of the old way and opened before him all manner of undreamed-of possibilities, as a result of which he decided to make clocks on a tremendous scale. The type of thing he aimed to produce was a thirty-hour clock with wooden works and a pendulum vibrating seconds; and he figured that by purchasing more water power and larger buildings he would be able to make such clocks at the rate of a thousand or more a year and therefore turn them out for as little as four dollars apiece--a mad enterprise in that era of limited economic conditions."