"Wretch, you dare to ask?" and Reb Lebish held his watch under my father's nose, pointed at our clock, and shouted again, like a man with a trodden toe: "Sim-cheh! Why don't you speak? It is a minute and a half ahead of the time! Throw it away!" My father was vexed. What did Reb Lebish mean by telling him to throw away his clock? "Who is to prove," said he, "that my clock is a minute and a half fast? Perhaps it is the other way about, and your watch is a minute and a half slow? Who is to tell?" Reb Lebish stared at him as though he had said that it was possible to have three days of New Moon, or that the Seventeenth of Tammuz might possibly fall on the Eve of Passover, or made some other such wild remark, enough, if one really took it in, to give one an apoplectic fit. Reb Lebish said never a word, he gave a deep sigh, turned away without wishing us "good evening," slammed the door, and was gone. But no one minded much, because the whole town knew Reb Lebish for a person who was never satisfied with anything: he would tell you of the best cantor that he was a dummy, a log; of the cleverest man, that he was a lumbering animal; of the most appropriate match, that it was as crooked as an oven rake; and of the most apt simile, that it was as applicable as a pea to the wall. Such a man was Reb Lebish. But let me return to our clock. I tell you, that _was_ a clock! You could hear it strike three rooms away: Bom! bom! bom! Half the town went by it, to recite the Midnight Prayers, to get up early for Seliches during the week before New Year and on the ten Solemn Days, to bake the Sabbath loaves on Fridays, to bless the candles on Friday evening. They lighted the fire by it on Saturday evening, they salted the meat, and so all the other things pertaining to Judaism. In fact, our clock was the town clock. The poor thing served us faithfully, and never tried stopping even for a time, never once in its life had it to be set to rights by a clockmaker. My father kept it in order himself, he had an inborn talent for clock work. Every year on the Eve of Passover, he deliberately took it down from the wall, dusted the wheels with a feather brush, removed from its inward part a collection of spider webs, desiccated flies, which the spiders had lured in there to their destruction, and heaps of black cockroaches, which had gone in of themselves, and found a terrible end. Having cleaned and polished it, he hung it up again on the wall and shone, that is, they both shone: the clock shone because it was cleaned and polished, and my father shone because the clock shone. And it came to pass one day that something happened. It was on a fine, bright, cloudless day; we were all sitting at table, eating breakfast, and the clock struck. Now I always loved to hear the clock strike and count the strokes out loud: "One--two--three--seven--eleven--twelve--thirteen! Oi! _Thirteen?_"