"Hawthorne, Nathaniel - Ethan Brand" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hawthorne Nathaniel)

called him in courtesy; an elderly ragamuffin, in his soiled
shirt-sleeves and tow-cloth trousers. This poor fellow had been an
attorney, in what he called his better days, a sharp practitioner, and
in great vogue among the village litigants; but flip, and sling, and
toddy, and cocktails, imbibed at all hours, morning, noon, and
night, had caused him to slide from intellectual to various kinds
and degrees of bodily labor, till, at last, to adopt his own phrase,
he slid into a soap-vat. In other words, Giles was now a
soap-boiler, in a small way. He had come to be but the fragment of a
human being, a part of one foot having been chopped off by an axe, and
an entire hand torn away by the devilish grip of a steam-engine.
Yet, though the corporeal hand was gone, a spiritual member
remained; for, stretching forth the stump, Giles steadfastly averred
that he felt an invisible thumb and fingers with as vivid a
sensation as before the real ones were amputated. A maimed and
miserable wretch he was; but one, nevertheless, whom the world could
not trample on, and had no right to scorn, either in this or any
previous stage of his misfortunes, since he had still kept up the
courage and spirit of a man, asked nothing in charity, and with his
one hand- and that the left one- fought a stern battle against want
and hostile circumstances.

Among the throng, too, came another personage, who, with certain
points of similarity to Lawyer Giles, had many more of difference.
It was the village doctor; a man of some fifty years, whom, at an
earlier period of his life, we introduced as paying a professional
visit to Ethan Brand during the latter's supposed insanity. He was now
a purple-visaged, rude, and brutal, yet half-gentlemanly figure,
with something wild, ruined, and desperate in his talk, and in all the
details of his gesture and manners. Brandy possessed this man like
an evil spirit, and made him as surly and savage as a wild beast,
and as miserable as a lost soul; but there was supposed to be in him
such wonderful skill, such native gifts of healing, beyond any which
medical science could impart, that society caught hold of him, and
would not let him sink out of its reach. So, swaying to and fro upon
his horse, and grumbling thick accents at the bedside, he visited
all the sick chambers for miles about among the mountain towns, and
sometimes raised a dying man, as it were, by miracle, or quite as
often, no doubt, sent his patient to a grave that was dug many a
year too soon. The doctor had an everlasting pipe in his mouth, and,
as somebody said, in allusion to his habit of swearing, it was
always alight with hell-fire.

These three worthies pressed forward, and greeted Ethan Brand
each after his own fashion, earnestly inviting him to partake of the
contents of a certain black bottle, in which, as they averred, he
would find something far better worth seeking for than the
Unpardonable Sin. No mind, which has wrought itself by intense and
solitary meditation into a high state of enthusiasm, can endure the
kind of contact with low and vulgar modes of thought and feeling to