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.