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THE CLOCK

The clock struck thirteen!

Don't imagine I am joking, I am telling you in all seriousness what happened in Mazepevke, in our house, and I myself was there at the time.

We had a clock, a large clock, fastened to the wall, an old, old clock inherited from my grandfather, which had been left him by my great-grandfather, and so forth. Too bad, that a clock should not be alive and able to tell us something beside the time of day! What stories we might have heard as we sat with it in the room! Our clock was famous throughout the town as the best clock going—"Reb Simcheh's clock"—and people used to come and set their watches by it, because it kept more accurate time than any other. You may believe me that even Reb Lebish, the sage, a philosopher, who understood the time of sunset from the sun itself, and knew the calendar by rote, he said himself—I heard him—that our clock was—well, as compared with his watch, it wasn't worth a pinch of snuff, but as there were such things as clocks, our clock was a clock. And if Reb Lebish himself said so, you may depend upon it he was right, because every Wednesday, between Afternoon and Evening Prayer, Reb Lebish climbed busily onto the roof of the women's Shool, or onto the top of the hill beside the old house-of-study, and looked out for the minute when the sun should set, in one hand his watch, and in the other the calendar. And when the sun dropt out of sight on the further side of