The Smuggler

It is wonderful what improvements have taken place in clocks and watches during the last half-century; how accurately the escapements are constructed, how delicately the springs are formed, how easily the wheels move, and what good time they keep. After all, society is but a clock, a very complicated piece of mechanism; and it, too, has undergone, in many countries, the same improvements that have taken place in the little ticking machines that we put in our pockets, or those greater indicators of our progress towards eternity that we hang upon our walls. From the wooden clock, with its weight and catgut, to the exquisite chronometer which varies only by a second or two in the course of the year, what a vast advance! and between even a period which many still living can remember, and that in which I now write, what a change has taken place in the machinery and organization of the land in which we dwell!