FINDING THE WAY AT SEA. 723 



dence in it. Seven days out from New York be came on deck, and 

 said with great decision, 'This thing's a swindle ! ' ' What's a swin- 

 dle?' '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, 1 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, d propos 

 des bottes, " had asked a great many questions about sea-sickness be- 

 fore 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 voy- 

 age 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 astronomi- 

 cal works should happen to remember this passage, and to state (as a 



1 Because set to go " fast." Of course, the other watches on board would be left to 

 go at their usual rate, and simply put forward at noon each day by so many minutes as 

 corresponded to the run eastward since the preceding noon. 



