THE CLOCK 117
person who was never satisfied with anything : he would tell you of the best cantor that he was a dummy, a log ; of the cleverest man, that he was a lumbering animal; of the most appropriate match, that it was as crooked as an oven rake; and of the most apt simile, that it was as applicable as a pea to the wall. Such a man was Reb Lebish.
But let me return to our clock. I tell you, that was a clock! You could hear it strike three rooms away: Bom ! bom ! bom ! Half the town went by it, to recite the Midnight Prayers, to get up early for Seliches dur- ing the week before New Year and on the ten Solemn Days, to bake the Sabbath loaves on Fridays, to bless the candles on Friday evening. They lighted the fire by it on Saturday evening, they salted the meat, and so all the other things pertaining to Judaism. In fact, our clock was the town clock. The poor thing served us faith- fully, and never tried stopping even for a time, never once in its life had it to be set to rights by a clock- maker. My father kept it in order himself, he had an inborn talent for clock work. Every year on the Eve of Passover, he deliberately took it down from the wall, dusted the wheels with a feather brush, removed from its inward part a collection of spider webs, desiccated flies, which the spiders had lured in there to their destruction, and heaps of black cockroaches, which had gone in of themselves, and found a terrible end. Hav- ing cleaned and polished it, he hung it up again on the wall and shone, that is, they both shone : the clock shone because it was cleaned and polished, and my father shone because the clock shone.
