Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/688

670 have abundant reason for great leniency in judging of the work of these really marvelous machines.

Remembering these things, we shall be prepared to accept the stories about the wonderful running of some watches with more or less allowance. That watches sometimes seem to go with very slight variation for long periods of time is often accounted for by the fact that the accelerating and the retarding effects in the carrying of them have nearly counterbalanced each other. A good watch may be so nicely regulated as to keep a mean time between its variations, which will be very accurate. I have heard of two watches in the course of my life for which their owners claimed that they varied only four seconds a month, and I can not help adding that they sought to touch the regulator just once more to overcome even this variation. With one of these men I had a personal interview, and succeeded in drawing out that, after all, he was not telling what his watch varied, but only how it stood at the end of a month; for aught he knew, it might have ranged a minute or two either way during the time. The other man I never met; but I trust these are the only men in the world who ever imagined that a pocket time-piece can be made to have a uniform variation of less than a second a week. But such men serve as an example of the misfortune it really is if one possesses too good a watch. When a man gets to reading the time on his watch by the secondhand, he is likely to feel discouraged and out of joint with the world much of the time, for his watch will not bear such scrutiny. A far happier man is he who can only afford a poor old "turnip" which, like Sam Weller's, must be set twice a day. A man who possesses one of these wonderful watches, supposed to run to the second, could hardly feel worse to find himself coming down with the cholera than to find that without seeming provocation his watch has gained or lost twenty-five seconds,

I add a few remarks upon the use and care of time-pieces, their visits to the jeweler, etc.

It is to be observed that there are many unscrupulous men working at the bench who have very little real knowledge of their trade, and who, to make a living, must make the most of what they get to do. Such men uniformly declare that any watch which comes into their hands to be repaired needs cleaning, which will cost you from a dollar to a dollar and a half. Sometimes this is true, and sometimes it is not. If you have a stem-winder in a close-fitting case, it is probably not dirty, and yet, if it has run two years or so, it ought to be oiled. This most jewelers will do, if you ask them to, for a small fee. If I owned a fine watch, my practice would be to take it to a jeweler, and have it thus oiled once a year, having it cleaned perhaps once in three.

If a jeweler tells you that there is some very serious trouble or break in your watch, which it is going to cost several dollars to get repaired, ask him to take the watch "down," as he terms it, and let