urn that way."

"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 melancholy 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 he suffered in secret, that it
was undermining his health, and yet he could do nothing. We felt that
any moment the clock might stop altogether. The imp started playing all
kinds of nasty tricks and idle pranks, shook itself sideways, and
stumbled like an old man who drags his feet after him. One could see
that the clock was about to stop forever! It was a good thing my father
understood in time that the clock was about to yield up its soul, and
that the fault lay with the balance weights: the weight was too light.
And he puts on a jostle, which has the weight of about four pounds. The
clock goes on like a song, and my father becomes as cheerful as a
newborn man.

But this was not to be for long: the clock began to lose again, the imp
was back at his tiresome performances: he moved slowly on one side,
quickly on the other, with a hoarse noise, like a sick old man, so that
it went to the heart. A pity to see how the clock agonized, and my
father, as he watched it, seemed like a flickering, bickering flame of a
candle, and nearly went out for grief.

Like a good doctor, who is ready to sacrifice himself for the patient's
sake, who puts forth all his energy, tries every remedy under the sun to
save his patient, even so my father applied himself to save