As the Timekeeper had been regulated, and its correctness ascertained, by the Inventor, before it was sent to Richmond, the question, of equal interest and difficulty, was how to account for so strange and ruinous an error, which continued unabated on the fourth day. At this time, William Harrison, who doubtless had conferred on the affair with his Father, suggested that the cause must be attraction. No sooner was the idea started, but his Majesty, on a sudden recollection, exclaimed he had found it out; and, in his ardour, instead of directing either of the persons before him to do that office, he hastened himself to open the door of a closet in the apartment, where appeared three most powerful combinations of loadstones, which it was unaccountably forgotten had been deposited there; and the effect of which left so unlocked for a disappointment no longer a mystery[1];—but it
- ↑ The surprising neglect in not removing these loadstones, neither the King nor William Harrison appear to have thought otherwise than entirely accidental. It did not interrupt the civilities that passed between the family of the latter and the young folks of Dr. Demainbury. The probable cause of an oversight so totally ruinous as it might have proved, to the scrutiny commenced, was, that the Doctor being subject to fits of the gout, and his Son (a gentleman about the age of thirty) attending for him at those times, the pungency of an attack from that malady prejudiced the recollection of the Astronomer so much as to lead to this deficiency in the instructions he would give his representative: at the same time it becomes a remarkable illustration of the truism—on what casual incidents the most momentous concerns of an individual, and inclusively those of the public, often depend.
