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

Salutations and Recreations, and she read and read and read until, sir, actually
it made my head swim.
"Do you know, sir, is Barclay still aliveЧ the man who wrote that book? Is there
no way of getting even with him?
"I couldn't get away. I might have walked out somehow with the chair fastened to
me; but I couldn't go, could I, sir, with the table tied to my leg, and
particularly if I had to climb the fence? So I had to set there and be regarded
as a burglar.
"But at last I would be heard, and I told her I was no burglar but an innercent
man; and then she looked in the index to find if Barclay had anything
interesting to say about the wickedness of telling falsehoods. And then I said I
was a member of the Baptist Society, and she said at once she would read Barclay
on the errors of that sect; but I insisted on being heard, and I explained to
her that I got into this trouble by trying to cure William Jones by frictional
electricity, and she said: 'Thee has an ingenious and fruitful mind to invent
such a story. Oh, that it had been turned to better devices than following a
life of evil!'
"'And it seems hard, too,' I said, 'that a perfectly respectable Baptist plumer
should be arrested as a burglar simply because he tried to relieve the pain of
William Jones by a scientific method invented by the Huxley Institute.'
"'Where is thy friend William Jones?' she asked.
"Do you know, sir, at that very moment you could hear through the partition
William Jones and Bella Dougherty laughing next door! It seemed like mockery to
me, a-setting there in chains, so to speak.
"'He is next door, ma'am,' I said, a-courting the hired girl.
"'I will prove if thee is telling the truth,' she said, and she got up and moved
toward the door.
"'No, ma'am, no!' I said; 'please don't do that! William mustn't know that I am
here;' and so she comes back and sets down again, and picks up Barclay, and
looks sorrerful at me, and says:
"'It is wicked for thee to have such vain imaginations. Why does thee persist in
pretending that there is a William Jones?' And then she started to look through
Barclay to find if he had anything that would fit the William Jones part of the
case.
"What could I do? I daresn't call in William Jones to prove my innercence; he
was mad all over at me and a bigger man, too, and here I was tied; and I
couldn't call Bella Dougherty without William Jones knowing it. It was hard,
sir, for a man as innercent as a little babe to set there with that sweet and
smooth old lady considering him a shameless story-teller and firing Barclay at
him, now wasn't it, sir? Would you have called William Jones, sir, under them
there circumstances, and his laughter and Bella Dougherty's still a-resounding
through the partition?
"Well, sir, that policeman was a long time a-coming with the old Quaker. I never
knowed why; but Friend Amelia she set down again and turned over the leaves of
Barclay and begun oncet more to read about Salutations and Recreations while,
strange as it may seem to you, sir, I felt that I'd ruther see the policeman and
be locked up in a dungeon than to hear more of it.
"But, howsomdever, after a while in comes the Quaker and the officer with him,
and the very first minute the officer seen me he says:
"'I reckernize him as an old offender.'