For no particular reason, here’s some Mark Twain for your reading pleasure, courtesy of Project Gutenberg (bless ’em!).

MY WATCH–[Written about 1870.]

AN INSTRUCTIVE LITTLE TALE

My beautiful new watch had run eighteen months without losing or gaining,
and without breaking any part of its machinery or stopping. I had come
to believe it infallible in its judgments about the time of day, and to
consider its constitution and its anatomy imperishable. But at last, one
night, I let it run down. I grieved about it as if it were a recognized
messenger and forerunner of calamity. But by and by I cheered up, set
the watch by guess, and commanded my bodings and superstitions to depart.
Next day I stepped into the chief jeweler’s to set it by the exact time,
and the head of the establishment took it out of my hand and proceeded to
set it for me. Then he said, “She is four minutes slow-regulator wants
pushing up.” I tried to stop him–tried to make him understand that the
watch kept perfect time. But no; all this human cabbage could see was
that the watch was four minutes slow, and the regulator must be pushed up
a little; and so, while I danced around him in anguish, and implored him
to let the watch alone, he calmly and cruelly did the shameful deed. My
watch began to gain. It gained faster and faster day by day. Within the
week it sickened to a raging fever, and its pulse went up to a hundred
and fifty in the shade. At the end of two months it had left all the
timepieces of the town far in the rear, and was a fraction over thirteen
days ahead of the almanac. It was away into November enjoying the snow,
while the October leaves were still turning. It hurried up house rent,
bills payable, and such things, in such a ruinous way that I could not
abide it. I took it to the watchmaker to be regulated. He asked me if I
had ever had it repaired. I said no, it had never needed any repairing.
He looked a look of vicious happiness and eagerly pried the watch open,
and then put a small dice-box into his eye and peered into its machinery.
He said it wanted cleaning and oiling, besides regulating–come in a
week. After being cleaned and oiled, and regulated, my watch slowed down
to that degree that it ticked like a tolling bell. I began to be left by
trains, I failed all appointments, I got to missing my dinner; my watch
strung out three days’ grace to four 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. 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.