The Clock by James Lincoln Collier Page A

can afford to own a clock. Naturally, demand for clocks will shoot up, and soon there’ll be more clockmakers at work than ever. You’ll see.”
    â€œWell, I hope all the farmers don’t go into the mills,” Ma said. “Otherwise we’re going to be a little short of food.”
    â€œNot a bit of it,” Pa said. “It’ll be the same thing in farming as in anything else. Science, new methods, everything up-to-date. There’ll be machines for planting, machines for cultivating, machines for cutting wood, machines for everything. Work to the clock, instead of leaving it to nature. Think of how much labor is lost in the winter when the days grow short. With the new methods we won’t need but half the farms we have, and the farmers will be free to go into the mills. Why, it won’t be long before home spinning has disappeared. With machines, the price of cloth has got so, it’s hardly worth making your own at home. Someday the spinning wheel will be a relic, a reminder of the olden times. People will laugh at the idea of making your own cloth at home.”
    I was mighty sick of hearing about all this, and I went out to the barn to feed the chickens. It had gotten even colder than before. I’d put a pan of water out in the barn for the chickens before dinner. It was frozen solid—not just on the top, but all the way down to the bottom. I turned the pan upside down and banged it, and the ice fell out in a chunk. I filled the pan up again, but I knew it wasn’t much use—it’d be frozen over pretty soon.
    In the morning I bundled up real good for my walk to the mill, but the cold went right through my clothes, and I had to keep clapping at my sides with my hands to stir up some heat. My nose like to froze off. I pulled my scarf up over my nose and mouth, just leaving my eyes showing. But that wasn’t any good because my breath soon soaked the scarf, and it would have frozen to my lips if I hadn’t pulled it away. After that, about every two minutes I’d pull my hand out of my mitten and hold it over my nose; and about the time my nose was warmed up my hand would be stinging and I’d put it back in my mitten again.
    Cold as it was, the snow was almost like ice. It was like trying to walk across a frozen pond, except that the snow wasn’t flat like a pond, but rutted and twisted. About every ten steps I slipped, and I fell down twice. Oh, I was pretty miserable by the time I got to the mill; and between trying to keep my nose from freezing off, and slipping and sliding, I was late when I got there, and worried that I was going to catch it from Mr. Hoggart.
    I needn’t have worried, for his mind was occupied with something else. The great waterwheel that ran the machinery was icing up. As I came up the mill road I could see Mr. Hoggart and a couple of the New York boys standing by the shunt where the water ran under the wheel, trying to poke ice off it with long poles. The ice was clustering around the spokes and struts that the wheel was built of. That ice was heavy, and was slowing the wheel down a good deal. But the worst was, if the wheel iced up enough it would quit moving altogether. The machines would stop, and we wouldn’t be able to card or spin or anything else until they got the wheel loose again.
    Mr. Hoggart had those poor boys knocking ice off that wheel with those heavy poles all day. He’d keep two or three of them down there until they were soaked and near frozen to death, and crying from the cold. Then he’d send them inside to thaw out and push another two or three out to handle the poles. To warm them up a little he’d give each of them a swallow of rum before they went out, and another when they came back; and of course he’d take one himself along the way. He was going to be drunk before the day was out, and I knew I’d best keep out of his way.
    I thought about Mr. Hoggart pestering me all