Clocks | Page 2

do all this, not from any selfish motives, but
from a sense of duty to the clock itself. You want to feel that, whatever
may happen, you have done the right thing by it, and that no blame can
attach to you.

So far as looking to it for any return is concerned, that you never
dream of doing, and consequently you are not disappointed. You ask
what the time is, and the girl replies:
"Well, the clock in the dining-room says a quarter past two."
But you are not deceived by this. You know that, as a matter of fact, it
must be somewhere between nine and ten in the evening; and,
remembering that you noticed, as a curious circumstance, that the
clock was only forty minutes past four, hours ago, you mildly admire its
energies and resources, and wonder how it does it.
I myself possess a clock that for complicated unconventionality and
light-hearted independence, could, I should think, give points to
anything yet discovered in the chronometrical line. As a mere
time-piece, it leaves much to be desired; but, considered as a
self-acting conundrum, it is full of interest and variety.
I heard of a man once who had a clock that he used to say was of no
good to any one except himself, because he was the only man who
understood it. He said it was an excellent clock, and one that you could
thoroughly depend upon; but you wanted to know it--to have studied its
system. An outsider might be easily misled by it.
"For instance," he would say, "when it strikes fifteen, and the hands
point to twenty minutes past eleven, I know it is a quarter to eight."
His acquaintanceship with that clock must certainly have given him an
advantage over the cursory observer!
But the great charm about my clock is its reliable uncertainty. It works
on no method whatever; it is a pure emotionalist. One day it will be
quite frolicsome, and gain three hours in the course of the morning,
and think nothing of it; and the next day it will wish it were dead, and
be hardly able to drag itself along, and lose two hours out of every four,
and stop altogether in the afternoon, too miserable to do anything; and
then, getting cheerful once more toward evening, will start off again of
its own accord.

I do not care to talk much about this clock; because when I tell the
simple truth concerning it, people think I am exaggerating.
It is very discouraging to find, when you are straining every nerve to
tell the truth, that people do not believe you, and fancy that you are
exaggerating. It makes you feel inclined to go and exaggerate on
purpose, just to show them the difference. I know I often feel tempted to
do so myself--it is my early training that saves me.
We should always be very careful never to give way to exaggeration; it
is a habit that grows upon one.
And it is such a vulgar habit, too. In the old times, when poets and
dry-goods salesmen were the only people who exaggerated, there was
something clever and distingue about a reputation for "a tendency to
over, rather than to under-estimate the mere bald facts." But everybody
exaggerates nowadays. The art of exaggeration is no longer regarded
as an "extra" in the modern bill of education; it is an essential
requirement, held to be most needful for the battle of life.
The whole world exaggerates. It exaggerates everything, from the
yearly number of bicycles sold to the yearly number of heathens
converted--into the hope of salvation and more whiskey. Exaggeration
is the basis of our trade, the fallow-field of our art and literature, the
groundwork of our social life, the foundation of our political existence.
As schoolboys, we exaggerate our fights and our marks and our
fathers' debts. As men, we exaggerate our wares, we exaggerate our
feelings, we exaggerate our incomes--except to the tax-collector, and to
him we exaggerate our "outgoings"; we exaggerate our virtues; we
even exaggerate our vices, and, being in reality the mildest of men,
pretend we are dare-devil scamps.
We have sunk so low now that we try to act our exaggerations, and to
live up to our lies. We call it "keeping up appearances;" and no more
bitter phrase could, perhaps, have been invented to describe our
childish folly.
If we possess a hundred pounds a year, do we not call it two? Our

larder may be low and our grates be chill, but we are happy if the
"world" (six acquaintances and a prying neighbor) gives us credit for
one hundred and fifty. And, when we have five hundred, we talk of a
thousand, and the all-important and beloved "world" (sixteen