Description
Short Story Collection Vol. 016
THE ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
An elderly man, with his pretty daughter on his arm, was passing along
the street, and emerged from the gloom of the cloudy evening into the
light that fell across the pavement from the window of a small shop. It
was a projecting window; and on the inside were suspended a variety of
watches, pinchbeck, silver, and one or two of gold, all with their
faces turned from the streets, as if churlishly disinclined to inform
the wayfarers what o’clock it was. Seated within the shop, sidelong to
the window with his pale face bent earnestly over some delicate piece
of mechanism on which was thrown the concentrated lustre of a shade
lamp, appeared a young man.
"What can Owen Warland be about?" muttered old Peter Hovenden, himself
a retired watchmaker, and the former master of this same young man
whose occupation he was now wondering at. "What can the fellow be
about? These six months past I have never come by his shop without
seeing him just as steadily at work as now. It would be a flight beyond
his usual foolery to seek for the perpetual motion; and yet I know
enough of my old business to be certain that what he is now so busy
with is no part of the machinery of a watch."
"Perhaps, father," said Annie, without showing much interest in the
question, "Owen is inventing a new kind of timekeeper. I am sure he has
ingenuity enough."
"Poh, child! He has not the sort of ingenuity to invent anything better
than a Dutch toy," answered her father, who had formerly been put to
much vexation by Owen Warland’s irregular genius. "A plague on such
ingenuity! All the effect that ever I knew of it was to spoil the
accuracy of some of the best wat
Product ID: 9781776779192
Sku: 9781776779192
