the sexton's attention to the fact that the face of the clock had but one hand, and that was loose and moved to and fro in the wind as helplessly as a weather-vane: "Yes," he replied with a grin, "I had to pull the other hand off; it caught in the wind so as to slow the clock, and when it blew hard sometimes it stopped her going altogether. I left the other hand on, as being loose it could do no harm"! This sounded a delightfully primitive way out of a mechanical difficulty; quite a stroke of rural genius! At the same time it appeared to us strangely inconsistent and illogical to have a clock going that did not show the time. "Lor' bless you, sir," responded he, "the old clock strikes the hours right enough, and that's all the folk want to know. Why, if the hands were going they'd never look up at 'em. Not they." What a lotus-eating land this, we thought, where people only care to know the hours, and take no thought of the intervals! Just then the sexton began to toll a loud bell vigorously. In reply to our query for the reason of this, he explained that it was the custom there to ring the bell every morning at eight o'clock, and again at one o'clock, "and it's one o'clock now, and so I'm ringing of it. I don't rightly know how old the custom be, but the bell be very useful, as it lets the people at work in the fields around know the time. We calls this the dinner bell. You see it carries farther than the sound of the clock striking."
We then ventured to admire the old tower, a fine specimen of Perpendicular masonry, possessing some much-weathered, curious but rather coarse gargoyles
