and let me go to protest; I gradually drifted back
into yesterday, then day before, then into last week,
and by and by the comprehension came upon me that all
solitary and alone I was lingering along in week before
last, and the world was out of sight. I seemed
to detect in myself a sort of sneaking fellow-feeling
for the mummy in the museum, and a desire to swap news
with him. I went to a watchmaker again.
He took the watch all to pieces while I waited, and
then said the barrel was “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.