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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, but he was cool.  He said he was sorry to disturb me, but as he was passing he noticed that I needed some lightning-rods.  I said, “Yes, yes—­go on—­what about it?” He said there was nothing about it, in particular—­nothing except that he would like to put them up for me.  I am new to housekeeping; have been used to hotels and boarding-houses all my life.  Like anybody else of similar experience, I try to appear (to strangers) to be an old housekeeper; consequently I said in an offhand way that I had been intending for some time to have six or eight lightning-rods put up, but—­The stranger started, and looked inquiringly at me, but I was serene.  I thought that if I chanced to make any mistakes, he would not catch me by my countenance.  He said he would rather have my custom than any man’s in town.  I said, “All right,” and started off to wrestle with my great subject again, when he called me back and said it would be necessary to know exactly how many “points” I wanted put up, what parts of the house I wanted them on, and what quality of rod I preferred.  It was close