House and Garden 
through the background, and 
a ship that heaves and tosses 
on the mimic sea when the 
hour sounds. 
The ancient tradition of 
the Italian clockmakers seems 
to be lost. At any rate the 
German clockmaker believes 
that modern Italian clocks 
have no special distinction, 
and he includes none in his 
collection. It is somewhat 
the same with the Swiss, in 
spite of their reputation as 
watchmakers and of the fact 
that the German Swiss pro¬ 
duce some curious musical 
clocks. 
Dutch clocks once had a 
great reputation, but the mod¬ 
ern Dutch clockmakers are hardly known 
outside of Holland. Curiously enough 
Dutch clockmaking of two hundred years 
ago or more found a sort of echo in Japan. 
The German clockmaker has in his collec¬ 
tion a very curious Japanese clock the exact 
significance of whose dial he does not under¬ 
stand. This clock, he finds, is an almost 
exact reproduction, in so far as the works go, 
of Dutch clocks made two or three centuries 
since. His theory is that the Dutch traders 
in the East introduced such clocks into Japan, 
OLD-FASHIONED GERMAN CLOCKS MADE IN THE BLACK FOREST 
OLD DUTCH CLOCKS WITH LEADEN FRONTS 
and that the Japanese artisans, with the ready 
imitative faculty for which they are famous, 
learned to make clocks of the same pattern. 
They are elaborate, compact and beautiful. 
Whether such clocks are still made in Japan 
he does not know. 
As a collection the clocks that thickly line 
the walls of the German clockmaker’s shop 
would grace a museum. He has picked up 
his curios in all lands as the result of his 
many years of wandering and working. Some 
are in running order ; others would require 
the work of many days to set 
them going. Many are only 
curious, but most have beauty 
to recommend them. They 
represent the ingenuity of ar¬ 
tist-artisans for several cen¬ 
turies. Some are such clocks 
as the German apprentice of 
forty years ago was accus¬ 
tomed to make as a sort of 
guarantee of his skill. The 
German clockmaker made one 
such himself. To the ap¬ 
prentice of that day and to 
those of an earlier time such 
exhibitions of skill were in ef- 
ect equivalent to the modern 
university student’s thesis 
written for his degree. 
English and American 
clockmakers commonly encase 
45 
