Sketches New and Old | Page 5

"swelled." He said he could reduce it in three days. After this the watch
averaged well, but nothing more. For half a day it would go like the
very mischief, and keep up such a barking and wheezing and whooping
and sneezing and snorting, that I could not hear myself think for the
disturbance; and as long as it held out there was not a watch in the land
that stood any chance against it. But the rest of the day it would keep
on slowing down and fooling along until all the clocks it had left
behind caught up again. So at last, at the end of twenty-four hours, it
would trot up to the judges' stand all right and just in time. It would
show a fair and square average, and no man could say it had done more
or less than its duty. But a correct average is only a mild virtue in a
watch, and I took this instrument to another watchmaker. He said the
king-bolt was broken. I said I was glad it was nothing more serious. To
tell the plain truth, I had no idea what the king-bolt was, but I did not
choose to appear ignorant to a stranger. He repaired the king-bolt, but
what the watch gained in one way it lost in another. It would run awhile
and then stop awhile, and then run awhile again, and so on, using its
own discretion about the intervals. And every time it went off it kicked
back like a musket. I padded my breast for a few days, but finally took
the watch to another watchmaker. He picked it all to pieces, and turned
the ruin over and over under his glass; and then he said there appeared
to be something the matter with the hair-trigger. He fixed it, and gave it
a fresh start. It did well now, except that always at ten minutes to ten
the hands would shut together like a pair of scissors, and from that time
forth they would travel together. The oldest man in the world could not
make head or tail of the time of day by such a watch, and so I went
again to have the thing repaired. This person said that the crystal had
got bent, and that the mainspring was not straight. He also remarked
that part of the works needed half-soling. He made these things all right,
and then my timepiece performed unexceptionably, save that now and
then, after working along quietly for nearly eight hours, everything
inside would let go all of a sudden and begin to buzz like a bee, and the

hands would straightway begin to spin round and round so fast that
their individuality was lost completely, and they simply seemed a
delicate spider's web over the face of the watch. She would reel off the
next twenty-four hours in six or seven minutes, and then stop with a
bang. I went with a heavy heart to one more watchmaker, and looked
on while he took her to pieces. Then I prepared to cross-question him
rigidly, for this thing was getting serious. The watch had cost two
hundred dollars originally, and I seemed to have paid out two or three
thousand for repairs. While I waited and looked on I presently
recognized in this watchmaker an old acquaintance--a steamboat
engineer of other days, and not a good engineer, either. He examined
all the parts carefully, just as the other watchmakers had done, and then
delivered his verdict with the same confidence of manner.
He said:
"She makes too much steam-you want to hang the monkey-wrench on
the safety-valve!"
I brained him on the spot, and had him buried at my own expense.
My uncle William (now deceased, alas!) used to say that a good horse
was, a good horse until it had run away once, and that a good watch
was a good watch until the repairers got a chance at it. And he used to
wonder what became of all the unsuccessful tinkers, and gunsmiths,
and shoemakers, and engineers, and blacksmiths; but nobody could
ever tell him.

POLITICAL ECONOMY
Political Economy is the basis of all good government. The wisest men
of all ages have brought to bear upon this subject the--
[Here I was interrupted and informed that a stranger wished to see me
down at the door. I went and confronted him, and asked to know his
business, struggling all the time to keep a tight rein on my seething
political-economy ideas, and not let them break away from me or get
tangled in their harness. And privately I wished the stranger was in the
bottom of the canal with a cargo of wheat on top of him. I was all in a
fever,