"Adeler, Max - Frictional Electricity" - читать интересную книгу автора (Adeler Max)

"Now, William, you-re a little school-scholar oncet again and you've missed your
lesson, and so you just go over there in that corner by the china closet and
stand with your face to the wall and say over and over your multiplication table
till you know it right.
"And so, to the supprise of Bella Dougherty, William Jones went right over in
the corner like I told him, and there he stood, saying: Six sixes is thirty-six,
six sevens is forty-two, and so on, whilst I set over with Bella Dougherty
peacefully enjoying ourselves just exactly 's if William Jones wasn't anywheres
about.
"And so, sir, it went on until Mrs. Muffitt she come down and said to Bella
Dougherty it was time to shut the house up, and then I bid her good- night and
told William to go home and go straight to bed, which he did, and a-saying the
multiplication table all the way down the street. He would have said it all
night, sir, I do believe, if I hadn't ordered him to stop and to begin saying
his prayers when I passed him in at his front door.
"You may believe me, sir, that I had William Jones on my mind all night and was
a-worrying a little about him too, for fear maybe he'd never come to. So around
I goes the first thing in the morning to his boarding-house, and his landlady
tells me he had been a-saying his prayers all mixed up like with the
multiplication table ever since he come home the night before. She was a bit
troubled about it, sir, as you may imagine, for William Jones was a good boarder
and it'd 'a' been money out of her pocket if he had lost his mind.
"So, then, I seen William Jones and knowed at oncet that the hypnertizing still
had hold of him. Very well; I had no idea how to get him out of it and it didn't
hurt him nohow, so I just commanded William Jones to drop the multiplication
table and his prayers and to fix all his intellect in the regular way on
plumbing; and William Jones at oncet calmed down and seemed his old self again.
"Then a wicked thought flashed into my mind. You know how it is yourself, sir;
you are tempted and you are weak and you fall, and then the first thing you
know, to be sure your sin'll find you out and there you are! Here I am, a
shattered hulk. It suddenly occurred to me, sir, that if I could control William
Jones, why not turn his affections away from Bella Dougherty, who might take a
fancy to him? who knows? women are so queer! and direct his thoughts toward my
own Aunt Maggie, who is a middle-aged widder and not so bad-looking, and far too
good for such a man as William Jones, although to speak the plain truth I had no
objections to having him for an uncle by marriage.
"Therefore I did so, sir, and before the week was out I heard that William Jones
was plumbing in the most supprising manner, plumbing here and plumbing there,
and paying attentions vigorously, so to speak, to Aunt Maggie every evening.
"In the meantime, sir, believe me, I did not lose time in my suit with Bella
Dougherty, who seemed real mad at William Jones when people began to talk about
his courting Aunt Maggie, so that in less than two weeks, when Bella Dougherty
heard that William Jones and Aunt Maggie had agreed to marry, I got Bella
Dougherty about as good as to say, although she never quite said it square, that
she would have me.
"I never knowed how it happened, sir, whether somebody waked William Jones up or
he just come to by himself, but, sir, anyhow, William Jones about that time
dropped hypnertism and was himself again. Imagine, sir, how things stood! There
never was a man as mad as William Jones; mad with me, and mad with Aunt Maggie,
to whom he sent a cruel message that he wa'n't marrying no grandmas, and that