“Remarkable clock!” said Sellers, and got up and wound it.  “I’ve been offered—­well, I wouldn’t expect you to believe what I’ve been offered for that clock.  Old Gov.  Hager never sees me but he says, ’Come, now, Colonel, name your price—­I must have that clock!’ But my goodness I’d as soon think of selling my wife.  As I was saying to ——­ silence in the court, now, she’s begun to strike!  You can’t talk against her—­you have to just be patient and hold up till she’s said her say.  Ah well, as I was saying, when—­she’s beginning again!  Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twen——­ah, that’s all.—­Yes, as I was saying to old Judge ——­go it, old girl, don’t mind me.—­Now how is that?——­isn’t that a good, spirited tone?  She can wake the dead!  Sleep?  Why you might as well try to sleep in a thunder-factory.  Now just listen at that.  She’ll strike a hundred and fifty, now, without stopping,—­you’ll see.  There ain’t another clock like that in Christendom.”

Washington hoped that this might be true, for the din was distracting —­though the family, one and all, seemed filled with joy; and the more the clock “buckled down to her work” as the Colonel expressed it, and the more insupportable the clatter became, the more enchanted they all appeared to be.  When there was silence, Mrs Sellers lifted upon Washington a face that beamed with a childlike pride, and said: 

“It belonged to his grandmother.”

The look and the tone were a plain call for admiring surprise, and therefore Washington said (it was the only thing that offered itself at the moment:)

“Indeed!”

“Yes, it did, didn’t it father!” exclaimed one of the twins.  “She was my great-grandmother—­and George’s too; wasn’t she, father!  You never saw her, but Sis has seen her, when Sis was a baby-didn’t you, Sis!  Sis has seen her most a hundred times.  She was awful deef—­she’s dead, now.  Aint she, father!”

All the children chimed in, now, with one general Babel of information about deceased—­nobody offering to read the riot act or seeming to discountenance the insurrection or disapprove of it in any way—­but the head twin drowned all the turmoil and held his own against the field: 

“It’s our clock, now—­and it’s got wheels inside of it, and a thing that flutters every time she strikes—­don’t it, father!  Great-grandmother died before hardly any of us was born—­she was an Old-School Baptist and had warts all over her—­you ask father if she didn’t.  She had an uncle once that was bald-headed and used to have fits; he wasn’t our uncle, I don’t know what he was to us—­some kin or another I reckon—­father’s seen him a thousand times—­hain’t you, father!  We used to have a calf that et apples and just chawed up dishrags like nothing, and if you stay here you’ll see lots of funerals—­won’t he, Sis!  Did you ever see a house afire?  I have!  Once me and Jim Terry——­”