My friend—­not the watch, but the watchmaker—­said quietly, “By your leave,” and, pulling a single hair from my head, touched it to a fine gauge, which indicated exactly the thickness of the hair.  It was a test of the twenty-five hundredth part of an inch.  But there are also gauges graduated to the ten-thousandth part of an inch.  Here is a workman making screws.  Can you just see them?  That hardly visible point exuding from the almost imperceptible hole is one of them.  A hundred and fifty thousand of them make a pound.  The wire costs a dollar; the screws are worth nine hundred and fifty dollars.  The magic touch of the machine makes that wire nine hundred and fifty times more valuable.  The operator sets them in regular rows upon a thin plate.  When the plate is full, it is passed to another machine, which cuts the little groove upon the top of each,—­and of course exactly in the same spot.  Every one of those hundred and fifty thousand screws in every pound is accurately the same as every other, and any and all of them, in this pound or any pound, any one of the millions or ten millions of this size, will fit precisely every hole made for this sized screw in every plate of every watch made in the factory.  They are kept in little glass phials, like those in which the homoeopathic doctors keep their pellets.

The fineness and variety of the machinery are so amazing, so beautiful,—­there is such an exquisite combination of form and movement,—­such sensitive teeth and fingers and wheels and points of steel,—­such fairy knives of sapphire, with which King Oberon the first might have been beheaded, had he insisted upon levying dew-taxes upon primroses without the authority of his elves,—­such smooth cylinders, and flying points so rapidly revolving that they seem perfectly still.—­such dainty oscillations of parts with the air of intelligent consciousness of movement,—­that a machinery so extensive in details, so complex, so harmonious, at length entirely magnetizes you with wonder and delight, and you are firmly persuaded that you behold the magnified parts of a huge brain in the very act of thinking out watches.

In various rooms, by various machines, the work of perfecting the parts from the first blank form cut out of Connecticut brass goes on.  Shades of size are adjusted by the friction of whirring cylinders coated with diamond dust.  A flying steel point touched with diamond paste pierces the heart of the “jewels.”  Wheels rimmed with brass wisps hum steadily, as they frost the plates with sparkling gold.  Shaving of metal peel off, as other edges turn, so impalpably fine that five thousand must be laid side by side to make an inch.  But there is no dust, no unseemly noise.  All is cheerful and airy, the faces of the workers most of all.  You pass on from point to point, from room to room.  Every machine is a day’s study and a life’s admiration, if you could only tarry.  No wonder the director says to me, as we move on, that his whole consciousness is possessed by the elaborate works he superintends.