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!”