Many years ago there lived here an aged and experienced mechanic.  Buried in his arts, he forgot the ways of the world, and promised his daughter to his gallant young apprentice, instead of to the hideous old magistrate who approached the maiden with offers of gold and dignity.  One day the youth and damsel found the unworldly artist weeping for joy before his completed clock, the wonder of the earth.  Everybody came to see it, and the corporation bought it for the cathedral.  The city of Basel bespoke another just like it.  This order aroused the jealousy of the authorities, who tried to make the mechanic promise that he would never repeat his masterpiece for another town.  “Heaven gave me not my talents to feed your vain ambition,” said the man of craft:  “the men of Basel were quicker to recognize my skill than you were.  I will make no such promise.”  Upon that the rejected suitor, who was among the magistrates, persuaded his colleagues to put out the artist’s eyes.  The old man heard his fate with lofty fortitude, and only asked that he might suffer the sentence in the presence of his darling work, to which he wished to give a few final strokes.  His request was granted, and he gazed long at the splendid clock, setting its wonders in motion to count off the last remaining moments of his sight.  “Come, laggard,” said the persecuting magistrate, who had brought a crowd of spectators, “you are taxing the patience of this kind audience.”  “But one touch remains,” said the old mechanic, “to complete my work;” and he busied himself a moment among the wheels.  While he suffered the agonies of his torture a fearful whir was heard from the clock:  the weights tumbled crashing to the floor as his eyes fell from their sockets.  He had removed the master-spring, and his revenge was complete.  The lovers devoted their lives to the comfort of the blind clockmaker, and the wicked magistrate was hooted from society.  The clock remained a ruin until 1842, when parts of it were used in the new one constructed by Schwilgue.

[Illustration:  The great clock.]

I found my bluebottle professor to be a Swiss, thirty years resident in the city, very accessible and talkative, and, like every citizen by adoption, more patriotic than even the native-born.

“It was a cheerless time for me, sir,” said he as we contemplated together the facade of the church, “when I saw that spire printed in black against the flames of the town.”

I begged frankly for his reminiscences.

“The bombardment of 1870,” said the professor, “was begun purposely, in contempt of the Bonapartist tradition, on the 15th of August, the birthday of Napoleon.  At half-past eleven at night, just as the fireworks are usually set off on that evening, a shell came hissing over the city and fell upon the Bank of France, crushing through the skylight and shivering the whole staircase within:  the bombardment that time lasted only half an hour, but it found means, after much killing and ruining among the private houses, to reach the buildings of the Lyceum, where we had placed the wounded from the army of Woerth.  While the city was being touched off in every direction, like a vast brush heap, we had to take these poor victims down into the cellars.”