THE CLOCK 119
"Plague take thirteen! What can it mean? What does it portend ? If it were out of order, it would have stopped. Then, what can it he ? The inference can only be that some spring has gone wrong."
"Why worry whether it's a spring or not?" said my mother. "You'd better take down the clock and put it to rights, as you've a turn that waj."
"Hush, perhaps you're right," answered my father, took down the clock and busied himself with it. He perspired, spent a whole day over it, and hung it up again in its place.
Thank God, the clock was going as it should, and when, near midnight, we all stood round it and counted twelve, my father was overjoyed.
"Ha? It didn't strike thirteen then, did it? When I say it is a spring, I know what I'm about."
"I always said you were a wonder," my mother told him. "But there is one thing I don't understand : why does it wheeze so ? I don't think it used to wheeze like that."
"It's your fancy," said my father, and listened to the noise it made before striking, like an old man preparing to cough: chil-chil-chil-chil-trrrr . . . and only then: bom ! bom ! bom ! and even the "bom" was not the same as formerly, for the former "bom" had been a cheerful one, and now there had crept into it a melan- choly note, as into the voice of an old worn-out cantor at the close of the service for the Day of Atonement, and the hoarseness increased, and the strike became lower and duller, and my father, worried and anxious. It was plain that the affair preyed upon his mind, that
