Page:St. Nicholas - Volume 41, Part 1.djvu/61



in all Germany were clocks made so well and in such numbers as at Kesselberg in the Black Forest, a village that stands high on the banks of the Rhine where it is swift and narrow as it surges across the border from its cradle in the Swiss mountains.

For a hundred and fifty years, the men had worked in the forest in the summer, cutting down trees and carefully drying the wood that, during the long winter, was to be made into clocks, for everybody in Kesselberg plied the same trade, and timepieces from this village marked the hours in homes of the rich all over the land.

But there came a time when the people grew tired of the old craft. Machine-made clocks had just come into use, and it became the fashion to use them instead of the hand-wrought ones. The price of Kesselberg wares came down, and some of the peasants, becoming discouraged at having to toil for the small income the work now yielded, went away to go into service in great houses in the cities. These sent word back of how much money they earned, and one after another the villagers left until only the aged remained at home, and it seemed that the ancient industry would die out. But the grand duke of the country was a wise man as well as a good one. He was proud of Kesselberg and its generations of clock-makers, and wanted the work to go on, that the village might be famous in the future as it had been in the past. So he offered a prize of five thousand marks to whoever should make the finest clock during the coming winter.

The word went like flame across an autumn field. Five thousand marks! That was over twelve hundred dollars, and more than a peasant could hope to earn in many years. News of the wonderful offer traveled far, until it reached the ears of all who had gone away, and there was wild excitement among them. They loved the Black Forest huts among the larch and hemlock trees far better than the great, strange houses in the cities, and the sighing of the wind in the woods was sweeter to them than the strains of cathedral organs: so back they went to their