There are three things that puzzle me; yes, four things that I cannot explain: Why street clocks never show the right time; why thermometers hanging outside of drug stores never indicate the right temperature; why slot machines on a railway platform never give the right weight; and why weather-vanes always point in the wrong direction. At bottom, I imagine, these are really not four things, but one. For it must be the same mysterious and malicious principle that takes each of these contrivances, set up to be a public guide to truth, and turns it into an instrument for the dissemination of error.

What makes me think that there is some animate principle behind such clocks is that they are so like a good many people one meets. There are persons who are packed with the most curiously inaccurate information on the most abstruse subjects, and they insist on imparting it to you. I have no ground to complain if I ask Jones what is the capital of Illinois and he says Chicago. The initiative was mine, and taken at my own peril, and it is fair that I should pay the penalty. But frequently Jones will break in upon me in the middle of a column of figures and tell me that the largest ranch in the world is situated in the State of Sonora, Mexico. "Yes?" I say, hoping that he will go away. "Yes," he assures me. "It is so large that the proprietor can ride 200 days on horseback without leaving his own grounds. He has 2,000,000 men working for him and he lives in a marble palace of 700 rooms. No one can be elected President of Mexico against his will."

Now obviously it would have been better for me to remain altogether unacquainted with Mexican conditions than to share Jones's distorted view of affairs in that interesting republic. But Jones insists on taking the innocent blank spaces in my knowledge of the world and filling them up with the most incorrect data. He tells me, for instance, that Mme. Finisterra once sang the mad scene from "Lucia" before the late Sultan of Morocco, who wept so bitterly that the performance was interrupted lest the monarch should go into convulsions. At the age of eight Mme. Finisterra knew twelve operatic soprano rÔles by heart, and when she was ten she played Juliet to Tamagno's Romeo. She now gets $10,000 a night, in addition to the service of a maid, a chef, and two private secretaries. In private life she is very stout. All this, needless to say, is not true.

But I must not forget the clocks. The worst of the class, oddly enough, are those found in front of watchmakers' and opticians' shops. I sometimes think that such clocks are purposely put out of order by the shop-keeper. The object is apparently to induce irascible old gentlemen to enter the store, watch in hand, in order to protest against the maintenance of a public nuisance. It is then a comparatively easy task to sell them a pair of solid gold spectacles with double lenses at a handsome profit. I, for one, would not blame the old gentleman who should pick up a stone and hurl it at one of these Tartuffes and Chadbands of the street-corner with their chubby, gilded hands reposing on their prosperous stomachs, sleek and smug and ultra-respectable, but unconscionable liars for all that. They are not content with their own success in cheating, they throw discredit upon honest folk. How many a faithful pocket-piece has been pulled out by its disappointed owner and actually set wrong to make it agree with one of these rubicund old sinners? Such is the overpowering effect of impudent assurance on the ordinary man.

The difference between the typical public clock and a watch out of order is obvious. Every prudent man knows the peculiarities of his own watch, just as he knows the peculiarities of his own wife and children; and he is consequently prepared to make allowances. But the clock on the street corner persists in thrusting false information upon you. The man who consults his watch does so with a purpose, and is naturally on the alert. But the cheating clock confronts him in moments of unsuspecting security, and throws him into a condition of the wildest alarm. It is peculiarly active on bright spring days, when people rise early and look forward to being at their desks half an hour before their usual time. On such occasions they invariably come upon a clock which points to a quarter of ten, and sends them scurrying breathless up four flights of stairs, to find the janitor engaged in cleaning out the baskets.

Church clocks are not so bad as jewellers' clocks; but they are bad enough, and, in the nature of things, we have a right to expect more from a church clock than from any other kind. For the same reason the weathercock on a church steeple is to be judged by a higher standard than the one over a carpenter's shop or the ordinary dwelling. I cannot, for instance, imagine a more dangerous moral ensemble than a church with a clergyman preaching bad doctrine in the pulpit, a clock indicating the wrong time on the tower, and, over all, a clogged weather vane pointing to the south when the wind blows from the east.

With reference to denominations I have observed that Presbyterian clocks are apt to be more reliable than any other kind, although the truest clock I have ever come across is on a little Dutch Reformed Church in Orange County. One of the most unprincipled clocks I can think of is just outside my window. I use unprincipled with intention, for this clock is not vicious, but giddy. If it were consistently late or consistently early, one might get used to it. But to look out of the window at 9:30 and find this clock pointing to eleven, and to look out ten minutes later and find it pointing to 9:35, is extremely disconcerting. One is inclined to expect something more restrained in a clock connected with the most prosperous parish of one of our most conservative denominations.

What I have said of clocks is largely true of the weighing-machine. Like the public clock, it thrusts itself upon us, and like the clock it betrays the confidence which it invites. I feel convinced that no one would ever think of using a weighing-machine if it did not constitute the most characteristically national piece of furniture in our railway stations. All weighing-machines cheat, but, if cheat they must, give me the machine that flatly refuses to budge from zero after it has swallowed your coin. I prefer that kind to the spasmodic machine on which the indicator moves forward one hundred pounds every two minutes and leaves a person utterly uncertain as to whether he should immediately begin dieting or purchase a bottle of codliver oil. Yet even this mockery of a weighing-machine is preferable to the emotional type of scales which simultaneously gives you a false weight, tells your fortune in utter disregard of age and sex, and plays a tune that cannot be recognised. When such a machine has registered a German matron's weight at 115 pounds and informed her that she will some day be President of the United States, it is ludicrous to have it break into a tinkle of self-appreciation, like a spaniel barking his own approval after walking across the room on his hind legs.

As for the ordinary street thermometer, there is this to be said for it: It may deceive, but it gives pleasure in deceiving. When a person is sagging beneath the heat of an August midday, it is a distinct source of comfort and pride to have the thermometer register 98 degrees. Even when we are fully aware that the mercury is too high by three or four degrees, it is easy enough to make one's self believe for the moment in the higher figure. If it were not for this spiritual stimulus, I should be inclined to regard all thermometers as a nuisance. Translating Fahrenheit into Centigrade and vice versa, is one of the most painful mental processes I can think of. I know that I cannot perform the operation, and I cannot help trying. I remember how a certain European monarch once lay seriously ill and my evening newspaper reported that his temperature was 38.3 degrees C. On my way home I attempted to put 38.3 degrees C. into terms of F., and it speaks well for the constitution of that European monarch that he should have survived the violent fluctuations of temperature to which I subjected him. At Grand Central Station he was literally burning up under a blazing heat of 142 degrees. At Ninety-sixth Street he was down to 74. As I walked home from the station I was forced to admit that I was not sure whether one should multiply by five-ninths or nine-fifths.

I would not be misunderstood. I am no enemy of the public institutions I have criticised. Far from it; clocks, thermometers, weather-vanes, and weighing-machines—they are but the remnants of the fine old communal life of which our urban and Anglo-Saxon civilisation has kept only too little. We do not lounge about and take our meals in the public squares as people used to do in Athens and still do in Sicily. We no longer fill our pitchers at a common fountain or dance on the village green or regulate the life of an entire city to the same signal from a campanile. Ours is an age of exaggerated privacy, where every one works behind closed doors and glances furtively at his watch. But precisely because it is a precious survival the public clock ought to keep itself above reproach and above suspicion.