ne 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