LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

so, indeed,” agreed Aunt Matilda, complacently smoothing her apron.

      “Very much so,” added Aunt Ann.

      “Decidedly,” resumed Aunt Sarah. “Your father, young man, handled the estate of our deceased Uncle Peter in a most upright and satisfactory fashion—for a man. So far, much is in your favor, since our unfortunate niece will not be contented without some sort of a husband. Your personal qualifications have yet to be proved, however. We presume that you can offer documentary evidence as to your own worth, sir?”

      “Not for a day or so, unfortunately,” confessed the young man. “The dogs destroyed all my papers. The only thing I could find was a portion of a brief note from my mother.”

      The three aunts, as by one electric impulse, bent forward with shining eyes.

      “From your mother!” hungrily repeated Aunt Sarah. “Let us see it, if you will, please.”

      He produced it reluctantly. It was not exactly the sort of letter a young man cares to parade.

      “’My beloved son,’” Aunt Sarah read aloud, pausing to bestow a softened glance upon him. “’I can not wait for your return to say how proud I am of you. Your noble and generous action in regard to the aged widow Crane’s property has just come to my ears, through a laughing complaint of your father about your unbusinesslike methods in dealing with those who have been unfortunate. In spite of his whimsically expressed disapproval, he feels that you are an honor to him. Your sister Nellie cried in her pride and love of you when she heard—’”

      The rest of the letter had been lost, but this was enough.

      Adnah had gradually hitched closer to him, and now her hand, unreproved, stole affectionately to his shoulder. Aunt Matilda was wiping her eyes. Aunt Ann openly sniffled. Aunt Sarah cleared her throat most violently.

      “Your references are all that we could wish, young man,” she presently admitted in a businesslike tone. “We shall waive, in your favor, our objections to men in general. If we must have one in the family we are to be congratulated upon having one whose mother is proud of him.”

      Coming from Aunt Sarah this was a marvelous concession. The young man bowed his head in pleased acknowledgment and, by and by, crossed his legs in comfort as a home-like feeling began to settle down upon him. Suddenly observing their bloomered exposure, however, he tried to poke his legs under the couch, and twiddled his thumbs instead.

      “And when do our young people expect to be married?” meek Sister Ann presently ventured to inquire.

      “As quickly as possible,” promptly answered the young man, smiling triumphantly down at the girl by his side. He was astonished, and rather pleased, too, to find her suddenly embarrassed and blushing prettily.

      “I believe, then,” announced Aunt Sarah, after due deliberation, “that you may now kiss our niece; may he not, Sisters Ann and Matilda?”

      “He may!” eagerly assented the others.

      “Very well, then, proceed,” commanded Aunt Sarah, folding her arms.

      The young man hastily braced himself to meet this new shock, then gazed down at the girl again. She was still blushing in her newly-found self-conscious femininity, but she trustingly held up her pretty lips to him, looking full into his eyes with the steady flame of her love burning unveiled—and he kissed her.

      “Ah-h-h-h!” sighed the three man-hating spinsters in ecstatic unison.

      THE ANGEL OF THE ODD, by Edgar Allan Poe

      It was a chilly November afternoon. I had just consummated an unusually hearty dinner, of which the dyspeptic truffe formed not the least important item, and was sitting alone in the dining-room with my feet upon the fender and at my elbow a small table which I had rolled up to the fire, and upon which were some apologies for dessert, with some miscellaneous bottles of wine, spirit, and liqueur. In the morning I had been reading Glover’s Leonidas, Wilkie’s Epigoniad, Lamartine’s Pilgrimage, Barlow’s Columbiad, Tuckerman’s Sicily, and Griswold’s Curiosities, I am willing to confess, therefore, that I now felt a little stupid. I made effort to arouse myself by frequent aid of Lafitte, and all failing, I betook myself to a stray newspaper in despair. Having carefully perused the column of “Houses to let,” and the column of “Dogs lost,” and then the columns of “Wives and apprentices runaway,” I attacked with great resolution the editorial matter, and reading it from beginning to end without understanding a syllable, conceived the possibility of its being Chinese, and so re-read it from the end to the beginning, but with no more satisfactory result. I was about throwing away in disgust

      This folio of four pages, happy work Which not even critics criticise,

      when I felt my attention somewhat aroused by the paragraph which follows:

      “The avenues to death are numerous and strange. A London paper mentions the decease of a person from a singular cause. He was playing at ‘puff the dart,’ which is played with a long needle inserted in some worsted, and blown at a target through a tin tube. He placed the needle at the wrong end of the tube, and drawing his breath strongly to puff the dart forward with force, drew the needle into his throat. It entered the lungs, and in a few days killed him.”

      Upon seeing this I fell into a great rage, without exactly knowing why. “This thing,” I exclaimed, “is a contemptible falsehood—a poor hoax—the lees of the invention of some pitiable penny-a-liner, of some wretched concocter of accidents in Cocaigne. These fellows knowing the extravagant gullibility of the age set their wits to work in the imagination of improbable possibilities, of odd accidents as they term them, but to a reflecting intellect (like mine, I added, in parenthesis, putting my forefinger unconsciously to the side of my nose), to a contemplative understanding such as I myself possess, it seems evident at once that the marvelous increase of late in these ‘odd accidents’ is by far the oddest accident of all. For my own part, I intend to believe nothing henceforward that has anything of the ‘singular’ about it.”

      “Mein Gott, den, vat a vool you bees for dat!” replied one of the most remarkable voices I ever heard. At first I took it for a rumbling in my ears—such as a man sometimes experiences when getting very drunk—but upon second thought, I considered the sound as more nearly resembling that which proceeds from an empty barrel beaten with a big stick; and, in fact, this I should have concluded it to be, but for the articulation of the syllables and words. I am by no means naturally nervous, and the very few glasses of Lafitte which I had sipped served to embolden me a little, so that I felt nothing of trepidation, but merely uplifted my eyes with a leisurely movement and looked carefully around the room for the intruder. I could not, however, perceive any one at all.

      “Humph!” resumed the voice as I continued my survey, “you mus pe so dronk as de pig den for not zee me as I zit here at your zide.”

      Hereupon I bethought me of looking immediately before my nose, and there, sure enough, confronting me at the table sat a personage nondescript, although not altogether indescribable. His body was a wine-pipe or a rum puncheon, or something of that character, and had a truly Falstaffian air. In its nether extremity were inserted two kegs, which seemed to answer all the purposes of legs. For arms there dangled from the upper portion of the carcass two tolerably long bottles with the necks outward for hands. All the head that I saw the monster possessed of was one of those Hessian canteens which resemble a large snuff-box with a hole in the middle of the lid. This canteen (with a funnel on its top like a cavalier cap slouched over the eyes) was set on edge upon the puncheon, with the hole toward myself; and through this hole, which seemed puckered up like the mouth of a very precise old maid, the creature was emitting certain rumbling and grumbling noises which he evidently intended for intelligible talk.

      “I zay,” said he, “you mos pe dronk as de pig, vor zit dare and not zee me zit ere; and I zay, doo, you mos pe pigger vool as de goose, vor to dispelief vat iz print in de print. ’Tiz de troof—dat it iz—ebery vord ob it.”

      “Who are you, pray?” said I with much dignity, although somewhat puzzled; “how did you get here? and what

Скачать книгу