He opens a door, while we speak, and you would not be in the least surprised, in the exalted condition to which the wonderful spectacle has brought you, to hear him say, “In this room we keep the Equator.”  In fact, as the door opens, and the gush of hot air breathes out upon your excited brain, it seems to you as if it undoubtedly were the back-door to—­the Tropics.  It is the dial-room, in which the enamel is set.  The porcelain is made in London.  It is reduced to a paste in this room, and fused upon thin copperplates at white heat.  When cooled, it is ground off smoothly, then baked to acquire a smooth glaze.  It is then ready for painting with the figures.

When all the pieces of the watch-movement are thus prepared, they are gathered in sets, and carried to the putting-up room, where each part is thoroughly tested and regulated.  The pieces move in processions of boxes, each part by itself; and each watch, when put together, is as good as every other.  In an old English lever-watch there are between eight and nine hundred pieces.  In the American there are but about a hundred and twenty parts.  My friend the director says, that, if you put a single American against a single European watch, the foreign may vary a second less in a certain time; but if you will put fifty or a hundred native against the same number of foreign watches, the native group will be uniformly more accurate.  In the case of two watches of exactly the same excellence, the regulator of one may be adjusted to the precise point, while that of the other may imperceptibly vary from that point.  But that is a chance.  The true test is in a number.

“If now we add,” ticked the faithful friend in my pocket, “that watch-movements of a similar grade without the cases are produced here at half the cost of the foreign, doesn’t it seem to you that we have Lancashire and Warwickshire in England and Locle and La Chaux de Fond in Switzerland upon the hip?”

“It certainly does,” I answered,—­for what else could I say?

Five different sizes of watches are made at Waltham.  The latest is the Lady’s Watch, for which no parent or lover need longer go to Geneva.  And the affectionate pride with which the manager took up one of the finest specimens of the work and turned it round for me to see was that of a parent showing a precious child.

While we strolled through every room, the workers were not less interesting to see than the work.  There are now about three hundred and fifty of them, of whom nearly a third are women.  Scarcely twenty are foreigners, and they are not employed upon the finest work.  Of course, as the machinery is peculiar to this factory, the workers must be specially instructed.  The foremen are not only overseers, but teachers; and I do not often feel myself to be in a more intelligent and valuable society than that which surrounded me, a wondering, staring, smiling, inquiring, utterly unskilful body in the ancestral halls of my tried friend and trusty counsellor, The American Watch.