"Bierce, Ambrose - Can Such Things Be" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bierce Ambrose)

become by death evil altogether.--HALL.
ONE dark night in midsummer a man waking from
a dreamless sleep in a forest lifted his head from the
earth, and staring a few moments into the blackness,
said: 'Catharine Larue.' He said nothing
more; no reason was known to him why he should
have said so much.
The man was Halpin Frayser. He lived in St.
Helena, but where he lives now is uncertain, for he
is dead. One who practises sleeping in the woods
with nothing under him but the dry leaves and
the damp earth, and nothing over him but the
branches from which the leaves have fallen and the
sky from which the earth has fallen, cannot hope for
great longevity, and Frayser had already attained
the age of thirty-two. There are persons in this
world, millions of persons, and far and away the
best persons, who regard that as a very advanced
age. They are the children. To those who view the
voyage of life from the port of departure the
bark that has accomplished any considerable distance
appears already in close approach to the farther
shore. However, it is not certain that Halpin
Frayser came to his death by exposure.
He had been all day in the hills west of the Napa
Valley, looking for doves and such small game as
was in season. Late in the afternoon it had come
on to be cloudy, and he had lost his bearings; and although
he had only to go always downhill--everywhere
the way to safety when one is lost--the absence
of trails had so impeded him that he was
overtaken by night while still in the forest. Unable
in the darkness to penetrate the thickets of manzanita
and other undergrowth, utterly bewildered
and overcome with fatigue, he had lain down near
the root of a large madrono and fallen into a dreamless
sleep. It was hours later, in the very middle of
the night, that one of God's mysterious messengers,
gliding ahead of the incalculable host of his companions
sweeping westward with the dawn line,
pronounced the awakening word in the ear of the
sleeper, who sat upright and spoke, he knew not
why, a name, he knew not whose.
Halpin Frayser was not much of a philosopher,
nor a scientist. The circumstance that, waking from
a deep sleep at night in the midst of a forest, he had
spoken aloud a name that he had not in memory
and hardly had in mind did not arouse an enlightened
curiosity to investigate the phenomenon.
He thought it odd, and with a little perfunctory