they been acquainted with them, would have
served them but little in lands such as theirs,
where the sun only shone on rare occasions, and
where cold, fog, and rain held sway for half the
year. However, it was necessary that they
should know when to prepare their meals of
half-cooked meat, when to gather in circles to
listen to the preaching of their druids, and
when to relieve the sentries who mounted
guard on the outskirts of their settlements; and
so this is what they imagined. At the break of
dawn, when the chieftain of the camp or village
rose, a boy-slave came and took up his
position at the entrance of his hut, and sat
down with two helmets, one full of pebbles and
the other empty, before him. His business was
to transfer the pebbles, one by one, and not too
fast, from the first helmet to the second; after
which he surrendered his turn to some one else,
who repeated the operation, and so on till dusk.
As the helmets were mostly very big, and the
pebbles, on the contrary, very small, the process
of emptying must have taken a good two hours.
It is probable, therefore, that the days of these
Franks and Norsemen, Teutons and Vandals,
were divided, like those of the Assyrians, into
six parts or watches. As soon as a helmet had
been emptied, the fact was proclaimed through
the camp by the striking of a sword against a
shield, gong fashion, at the chieftain's door.
The echo was caught up around, and men knew
that dinner time had come.

But this was not the only method of marking
the time. There were other ways, which
differed according to the locality and the various
pursuits of the people. In peasant districts,
the labourer reckoned by the number of
furrows he could plough, or, if it was harvest
time, by the quantity of corn he could reap.
In towns, where some faint remnant of Roman
civilisation survived, the reckoning was kept by
watchmen. At daybreak a soldier started on
foot (or, if the town was a large one, on
horseback) to walk round the city. When he had
gone his round, the first watch was over; and
he returned to his quarters blowing loud on a
trumpet, whilst a second soldier set out in
silence to perform the second watch. This
continued uninterruptedly day and night, the
only difference being that after sunset there
was no trumpet blowing, and that the watchmen,
instead of proceeding singly, went their
rounds in batches of ten or a dozen.

Finally, as a last instance of barbarous
chronometry, we may allude to the method
employed in monasteries, the first of which,
founded by St. Benedict, was instituted at the
beginning of the sixth century (A.D. 523). The
monks were in the habit of computing time by
the number of prayers they could gabble, and
it was hence that the custom of wearing chaplets
of beads arose. The task assigned to each
monk was to recite as many "paters" and
"aves" as there were beads on his string, and
as the orthodox number on a chaplet was
supposed to be then, as it is now, thirty-three—
that is, one for each year of our Saviour's life—
there was work for a full hour and a half, if
conscientiously performed. As in the case of
the urban watchmen, one monk was relieved
by another, and the termination of each "vigil"
was notified to the community by the tolling of
the chapel bell. We may add that this custom
continues unaltered in certain monastic
establishments. In monasteries of a severe order
there is no such thing as a clock to be seen.
The only timekeepers are the shorn, becowled
monks, kneeling in perpetual adoration.

A century after the final overthrow of the
Roman Empire, the habit of reckoning by hours
and minutes had completely disappeared from
Western Europe. One by one every vestige of
art and science disappeared, and, had it not been
for the kingdoms of the East, which kept the
flame of science just flickering whilst the West
was in darkness, our present system of horology
would have fallen into complete abeyance. It
was the famous Caliph of Bagdad, Haroun-al-
Raschid, who restored the old water clock to
Europe. In the year 807 he sent a magnificent
clepsydra as a token of friendship to
Charlemagne; but it seems that the present
was looked upon as a thing to be rather
admired than copied, for we find no mention of
any water clocks of French make until the
reign of Philip, contemporary of William the
Conqueror. Perhaps the reason of this is that
the sand-glass (sablier) had been invented in
France shortly before the accession of
Charlemagne, and that this last contrivance was
judged more handy and simple than the other.
The first sablier was made by the same man
who re-invented the blowing of glass, after the
secret had been lost for some centuries. He
was a monk of Chartres, named Luitprand, and
the sand-glass he made was the exact prototype
of all those that have been manufactured
since. It consisted of two receptacles of pear-
like shape joined by their slender ends. When
the sand had all run out from one into the
other, the lower glass was turned uppermost
and kept in that position till empty. Shortly
after he had received the gift of Haroun-al-
Raschid, Charlemagne caused a monster sablier
to be made with the horal divisions marked on
the outside by thin lines of red paint. This
was the first hour-glass. It required to be
turned over once only in twelve hours, and, if
it was blown with anything like the care which
modern hour-glasses are, it must have kept
time with as much precision as the best of lever
clocks. Indeed, it is not rare to hear people
declare, even now-a-days, that the hour-glass
is the best timepiece that was ever invented.

Whilst France was thus showing to the
front in matters of science, Old England, with
true conservative instinct, was still marking
time in a host of antiquated, inconvenient ways.
Neither did our ancestors betray any greater
disposition to adopt the French inventions than
we do in these days, when it is a question of
taking up some good reform that comes to us
from abroad. King Alfred, who reigned from
872 to 900, must certainly have heard speak of
the hour-glass; it is even very probable that
he possessed one of his own, for the monks and