It will go
with any or all parts in action, or with any or all parts dormant. It
has four chime barrels, and plays sixty-five tunes, many of them in
two or three parts, on nineteen musical bells, and on the like number
of double musical wires. A child may do everything necessary to show
its varied and complicated action.
[Illustration: LUTTERWORTH AND THE RIVER SWIFT, WHERE THE ASHES OF
WICLIF WERE SCATTERED.]
The maker was Mr. Deacon, a Baptist minister of Barton-in-the-Beans, who
began life as a farm boy when he was eleven years of age. A gentleman
happened to call on the farmer one evening and had some nuts given to
him, and as he could not crack them, one of the other servants said to
the boy, "Sam, bring the wooden nut-crackers you made!" When the boy
brought them, the visitor, after cracking a nut, examined them carefully
for some time, and was so struck with the ingenuity displayed in their
construction that he took the lad and apprenticed him to a clock-maker
in Leicester, where he became one of the cleverest workmen in the
kingdom, the most elaborate and curious piece of mechanism he made being
this wonderful clock.
We returned from Lutterworth by a different route, for we were now off
to see Peeping Tom at Coventry; but our experiments on the roads were
not altogether satisfactory, for we got lost in some by-roads where
there was no one to inquire from, and eventually reached the snug little
village of Monks Kirby.
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