Purchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. 1st World Library-Literary Society is a non-profit educational organization. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG - - My beautiful new watch had run eighteen months without losing or gaining, and without breaking any part of its machinery or stopping. I had come to believe it infallible in its judgments about the time of day, and to consider its constitution and its anatomy imperishable. But at last, one night, I let it run down. I grieved about it as if it were a recognized messenger and forerunner of calamity. But by and by I cheered up, set the watch by guess, and commanded my bodings and superstitions to depart. Next day I stepped into the chief jeweler's to set it by the exact time, and the head of the establishment took it out of my hand and proceeded to set it for me. Then he said, "She is four minutes slow-regulator wants pushing up." I tried to stop him - tried to make him understand that the watch kept perfect time. But no; all this human cabbage could see was that the watch was four minutes slow, and the regulator must be pushed up a little; and so, while I danced around him in anguish, and implored him to let the watch alone, he calmly and cruelly did the shameful deed. My watch began to gain. It gained faster and faster day by day. Within the week it sickened to a raging fever, and its pulse went up to a hundred and fifty in the shade. At the end of two months it had left all the timepieces of the town far in the rear, and was a fraction over thirteen days ahead of the almanac.

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How is this book unique? Font adjustments & biography included Unabridged (100% Original content) Illustrated About Sketches New and Old, Mark Twain by Mark Twain Sketches New and Old is a group of fictional stories--except for "The Case of George Fisher"--by Mark Twain. It was published in 1875. It includes the short story "A Ghost Story", among others. A real storyteller can make a great story out of anything, even the most trivial occurrence. Composed between 1863 and 1875, the sixty-three often outrageous sketches in Sketches, New and Old contain, for instance, a piece about the difficulty of getting a pocket watch repaired properly; complaints about barbers and office bores; and satirical comments on bureaucrats, courts of law, the profession of journalism, the claims of science, and the workings of government. In Mark Twain's hands, all these potentially dry and dull topics bristle with vitality and interest. "What fascinates Twain," Lee Smith writes in her introduction, is how people "react to the things that happen to them." Twain "lets them speak in their own voices by and large, in a chorus ranging from high-flown oratory to the plain speech of working people.... It seems generally true that the more elevated the speech, the likelier that person is to be an idiot; words of wisdom and common sense are invariably voiced by the common man"--or woman. "The most profound and moving sketch in this whole collection" Smith writes, is one "told by a freed slave." The candid, ironic, playful, and petulant sketches in this volume are indispensable to our understanding of a harried genius during thirteen quite amazing years.