“Do you think,” whispered I to my watch, as I listened to these facts, “that the experiment is still doubtful?”

My companion ticked so indignantly that my friend the manager evidently suspected what question I had asked, and he answered at once,—­

“The experiment is already perfectly successful.  We have had our critical moments, but”——­

“But now,” proudly ticked my watch, “now we have weathered the Cape Horn of adversity and doubt, and ride secure upon the deep Pacific sea of prosperity and certainty.  You had better blow a note like that through your Atlantic Bugle.  Set your tune high, and play it up loud and lively.”

“It seems to me,” answered I, “that the tune plays itself.  There is no need of puffing at the instrument.”

While my watch was thus pleasantly jesting, we had passed through a low pine wood and come out upon the banks of the Charles River.  Just before us, upon the very edge of a river-basin, was a low two-story building full of windows, and beyond, over the trees, were spires.  They were the steeples of Waltham, and the many-windowed building was the factory of the American Watch Company.  It stands upon a private road opened by the Company in a domain of about seventy acres belonging to them.  The building thus secures quiet and freedom from dust, which are essential conditions of so delicate and exquisite a manufacture.

The counting-room, which you enter first, is cheerful and elegant.  A new building, which the Company is adding to the factory, will give them part of the ampler room the manufacture now demands; and within the last few months the Company has absorbed the machinery and labor of a rival company at Nashua, which was formed of some of the graduate workmen of Waltham, but which was not successful.  Every room in the factory is full of light.  The benches of polished cherry, the length of all of them together being about three-quarters of a mile, are ranged along the sides of the rooms, from the windows in which the prospect is rural and peaceful.  There is a low hum, but no loud roar or jar in the building.  There is no unpleasant smell, and all the processes are so neat and exquisite that an air of elegance pervades the whole.

The first impression, upon hearing that a watch is made by machinery, is, that it must be rather coarse and clumsy.  No machine so cunning as the human hand, we are fond of saying.  But, if you will look at this gauge, for instance, and then at any of these dainty and delicate machines upon the benches, miniature lathes of steel, and contrivances which combine the skill of innumerable exquisite fingers upon single points, you will feel at once, that, when the machinery itself is so almost poetic and sensitive, the result of its work must be correspondingly perfect.