too, with the tallest steeples that had ever been seen in England.

Some of his friends, no doubt, advised Isaac's grandmother to apprentice
him to a clock-maker; for, besides his mechanical skill, the boy seemed
to have a taste for mathematics, which would be very useful to him in
that profession. And then, in due time, Isaac would set up for himself,
and would manufacture curious clocks, like those that contain sets of
dancing figures, which issue from the dial-plate when the hour is
struck; or like those where a ship sails across the face of the clock,
and is seen tossing up and down on the waves as often as the pendulum
vibrates.

Indeed, there was some ground for supposing that Isaac would devote
himself to the manufacture of clocks; since he had already made one, of
a kind which nobody had ever heard of before. It was set a-going, not
by wheels and weights like other clocks, but by the dropping of water.
This was an object of great wonderment to all the people round about;
and it must be confessed that there are few boys, or men either, who
could contrive to tell what o'clock it is by means of a bowl of water.

Besides the water-clock, Isaac made a sundial. Thus his grandmother was
never at a loss to know the hour; for the water-clock would tell it in
the shade, and the dial in the sunshine. The sundial is said to be
still in existence at Woolsthorpe, on the corner of the house where
Isaac dwelt. If so, it must have marked the passage of every sunny hour
that has elapsed since Isaac Newton was a boy. It marked all the famous
moments of his life; it marked the hour of his death; and still the
sunshine creeps slowly over it, as regularly as when Isaac first set it
up.