One day Frederick told him of something that actually happened in a small country and in our own times. The mayor's clock - the large one on the town hall - kept time for the whole town and for everyone who lived there. The clock did not run very well, but that didn't matter nor did it keep anyone from looking to it for the time. But by and by railroads were built in that country, and in all countries railroads run by the clock. One must therefore be sure of the time, and know it exactly, or there will be collisions. At the railroad station they had a clock that was absolutely reliable, and exactly in accord with the sun. But as the mayor's was not, everyone went by the railroad clock.
I laughed, and thought the story a funny one, but Great-Grandfather did not laugh. He became very serious.
"There is a profound meaning in what you have told me," he declared, "and I understood the thought that prompted you to tell me the story. There's a moral in the clockwork. It reminds me of another clock - my parents' simple, old-fashioned Bornholm clock, with lead weights. It measured out the time of their lives and of my childhood. Perhaps it didn't run any too well, but it ran just the same. We would look at the hour hand and believe in it, with never a thought about the works inside. In those days the machinery of government was like that old clock. Everybody believed in it and only looked at the hour hand. Now government machinery is like a clock in a glass case, so that one can look directly into the works and see the wheels turning and whizzing around. Sometimes we become quite frightened over this spring or that wheel, and then I wonder how it is possible for all these complicated parts to tell the right time. I have lost my childish belief in the rightness of the old clock. That is the weakness of this age."
Great-Grandfather would talk on until he became quite angry. He and Frederick could not agree, yet they could not bear to be separated - "just like old times and new." Both of them felt this - and so did our whole family - when Frederick was to set out on his journey to far-away America. It was on business for the Company, so the journey had to be made. To Great-Grandfather, it was a sad parting, and it seemed a long, long journey - all the way across a great ocean, and to the other side of the globe.
"You shall get a letter from me every fortnight," Frederick promised. "And faster than any letter can go, you shall hear from me by telegraph. The days will be like hours, and the hours like minutes."
By telegraph we received Frederick's greeting to us from England, just as he boarded the steamship. Sooner than any letter could reach us, even though the swift sailing clouds had been our postman, came greetings from America, where Frederick had landed only a few hours before.
"What a glorious and divine inspiration has been granted our age," said Great-Grandfather. "It is a true blessing to the human race."
"And it was in our country," I said, "that the natural principle underlying the telegraph was first understood and stated. Frederick told me so."
"Yes," Great-Grandfather said, and he kissed me. "Yes, and I once looked into the kindly eyes that were the first to see and understand this marvelous law of nature - his were the eyes of a child, like yours - and I have shaken his hand." Then he kissed me again.
More than a month had gone by, when a letter came from Frederick with the news that he was engaged to a beautiful and lovable young lady. He was sure that everyone in our family would be delighted with her, and he sent us her photograph. We looked at it first with our bare eyes, and then with a magnifying glass, for the advantage of photographs is not only that they stand close inspection through the strongest glass, but that then you see the full likeness even better. No painter has ever been able to do that, even in the greatest of the ages past.