The dress of the stout citizen announced a sedentary man rather than a
cosmopolitan. He had a shirt-front much hardened with starch; a white
waistcoat, like an alabaster carving, which pushed his shirt away
up round his ears; and a superb bluebottle-colored coat, with metal
buttons. It was the costume of a stay-at-home, and I learned afterward
that he was a local professor of geography and political science--the
first by day, the last at night only in beer-gardens and places of
resort.

[Illustration: THE HIGHEST SPIRE IN EUROPE.]

"Nay," I said, "the barnyard bird is of all others the fittest for a
timepiece: he chants the hours for the whole country-side, and an old
master of English song has called him Nature's 'crested clock.'"

"With all deference," said the bourgeois, "I would still have a
substitute provided for yonder cock. I would set up the Strasburg
goose. Is he not our emblem, and is not our commerce swollen by the
inflation of the _foie gras_? In one compartment I would show him fed
with sulphur-water to increase his biliary secretion; another might
represent his cage, so narrow that the pampered creature cannot even
turn round on his stomach for exercise; another division might be
anatomical, and present the martyr opening his breast, like some
tortured saint, to display his liver, enlarged to the weight of three
pounds; while the apex might be occupied by the glorified, gander in
person, extending his neck and commenting on the sins of the Strasburg
pastry-cooks with a cutting and sardonic hiss."

You have not forgotten, reader, the legend of the old clock?