Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/741

Rh in it. Seven days out from New York he came on deck, and said with great decision, 'This thing's a swindle!' 'What's a swindle?' 'Why, this watch. I bought her out in Illinois—gave $150 for her, and I thought she was good. And, by George, she is good on shore, but somehow she don't keep up her lick here on the water—gets sea-sick, may be. She skips; she runs along regular enough, till half-past eleven, and then all of a sudden she lets down. I've set that old regulator up faster and faster, till I've shoved it clear round, but it don't do any good; she just distances every watch in the ship, and clatters along in a way that's astonishing till it's noon, but them "eight bells" always gets in about ten minutes ahead of her any way. I don't know what to do with her now. She's doing all she can; she's going her best gait, but it won't save her. Now, don't you know there ain't a watch in the ship that's making better time than she is; but what does it signify? When you hear them "eight bells," you'll find her just ten minutes short of her score—sure.' The ship was gaining a full hour every three days, and this fellow was trying to make his watch go fast enough to keep up to her. But, as he had said, he had pushed the regulator up as far as it would go, and the watch was 'on its best gait,' and so nothing was left him but to fold his hands and see the ship beat in the race. We sent him to the captain, and he explained to him the mystery of 'ship-time,' and set his troubled mind at rest. This young man," proceeds Mr. Clemens, à propos des bottes, "had asked a great many questions about sea-sickness before we left, and wanted to know what its characteristics were, and how he was to tell when he had it. He found out."

I cannot leave Mark Twain's narrative, however, without gently criticising a passage in which he has allowed his imagination to invent effects of longitude which assuredly were never perceived in any voyage since the ship Argo set out after the Golden Fleece. "We had the phenomenon of a full moon," he says, "located just in the same spot in the heavens, at the same hour every night. The reason of this singular conduct on the part of the moon did not occur to us at first, but it did afterward, when we reflected that we were gaining about twenty minutes every day; because we were going east so fast, we gained just about enough every day to keep along with the moon. It was becoming an old moon to the friends we had left behind us, but to us Joshuas it stood still in the same place, and remained always the same." O Mr. Clemens, Mr. Clemens! In a work of imagination (as the "Innocents Abroad" must, I suppose, be to a great extent considered), a mistake such as that here made is perhaps not a very serious matter; but, suppose some unfortunate compiler of astronomical works should happen to remember this passage, and to state (as a