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

made Aunt Maggie mad; and then William Jones set down and wrote me a letter to
the general effect that whenever he met me my course in this life would be
short.
"Naturally, sir, as you may believe, I kept out of William Jones's way, for I am
not fond of quarreling, and besides, William Jones is forty pounds heavier, sir,
than I am.
"But one night while I was setting in the kitchen at Muffitt's, having some
uplifting conversation with Bella Dougherty, there was a sudden knock on the
side door, and up she jumps, pale and skeered, and says: I do believe that is
William Jones. He said he might call, maybe, this evening! So, of course, as I
never hunt trouble, I raised the window sash over by the kitchen table at the
back and went out just as William Jones come in the side door. He kept the door
open a-watching for me, and so as I couldn't get to the gate I climbed over the
high fence into the next yard.
"I ought to have gone right home, sir, without stopping, but I hated to leave
William Jones there with Bella Dougherty, and me just driven out; so, as it was
raining hard and I had on my Sunday suit, what does I do but try the latch on
the kitchen door of the house next to Mr. Muffitt's, and finding the door
opened, in I walked and set down in a chair to await what was going to happen.
That was a bad job for me, sir! It isn't safe to take one false step.
"For the next minute the inside door from the dining-room springs open and a man
jumps out and grabs me and says: 'I've got thee at last, have I!' He was a
Quaker, sir; a big man and with a grip like iron. I never knowed a man with a
grip like that. Did you ever, sir, have your fingers in the crack of a door and
somebody a-leaning hard on the door? That was the way this Quaker held me. Then
he calls out 'Amelia! Amelia!' and in a minute a sweet old Quaker lady comes out
with a candle, and he says to her: 'I've caught that burglar, Amelia; thee get
the clothes line.'"
"So the lady she gets the clothes line and that man he ties my hands and my arms
behind my back, good and tight, and then he made me set down and he ties me to
the chair, and at last he gives the rope two or three turns around the leg of
the kitchen table and says to me: 'Friend, thee can just set there while I go to
get an officer!' Gave me no chance to explain. Took it all for granted; whereas
if he would have listened to me I could have cleared up the whole mystery in two
minutes.
"So then, sir, out he goes for a policeman, and the old lady sets down in a
chair not far from me and said she was sorry I was so wicked and asked me about
my mother, and if I ever went to First-Day school, and a whole lot of things.
Then a thought seemed to strike her and she went into the next room and came
back with a book in her hand, and she said she would read a good book to me
while we waited for justice to take its course.
"She was lovely to look at, sir, with her tidy brown frock and the crape
handkerchief folded acrost her bosom and her cap and the smile on her face; a
sweet face, sir; an angel face; yes, sir, but sweet faces often has cruel
dispositions behind them. For then she told me that the book was called
Barclay's Apology for the People called Quakers, or something like that, and she
begun to read it to me.
"Have you ever read that book, sir? It is dedicated, I think, to Charles the
Second, and it begins with Fifteen Propositions, and she read every one of them
Propositions from first to last. Then she turned to the section, sir, about