A Guest at the Ludlow and Other Stories (1896)

Edgar Wilson "Bill" Nye's short-story and humor collection follows comic incidents, tall tales, and satirical sketches in Nye's late nineteenth-century style. (Open Library)

Watches

Waterbury watch: Nye jokes that an undeveloped idea can be dressed so quickly that it gets a suit of clothes with a Waterbury watch in each pocket.

Source text: Is the time coming when general dealers in apparel and gents' furnishing goods for the use of bare facts, and men who attend to the costuming, draping, and swaddling of nude ideas, will compete so closely with each other that, before a think has its eyes fairly open, one of these gentlemen will slap a suit of clothes on it, with a Waterbury watch in each pocket, and have a boy half way to the office with the bill? (Project Gutenberg ebook 31884)