"Robert A. Heinlein - To Sail Beyond the Sunset" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

the presence of children). тАЪDoctor! You come inside at once! I will not be
widowed just to let you prove to yourself that you can stand up to anything!тАЩ
Father came down promptly, fastening the slant door behind him. тАЪMadam,тАЩ
he stated, тАЪas always your logic is irrefutable.тАЩ
There were hayrides with young people of our own age, usually with fairly
tolerant chaperonage; there were skating parties on the Marais des Cygnes;
there were Sunday School picnics, and church ice-cream socials, and more
and more. Happy times do not come from fancy gadgets; they come from
тАЪmale and female created He them,тАЩ and from being healthy and filled with
zest for life.
The firm discipline we lived under was neither onerous nor unreasonable;
none of it was simply for the sterile purpose of having rules. Outside the
scope of those necessary rules we were as free as birds.
Older children helped with younger children, with defined responsibilities. AI]
of us had assigned chores, from about age six, on up. The assignments were
written down and checked off-and in later years I handled my own brood
(larger than my motherтАЩs) by her rules. Hers were sensible rules; they had
worked for her; they would work for me.
Oh, my rules were not exactly like my motherтАЩs rules because our
circumstances were not exactly alike. For example, a major chore for my
brothers was sawing and chopped wood; my sons did not chop wood
because our home in Kansas City was heated by a coal furnace. But they did
tend the furnace, fill the coal bin (coal was delivered to the kerb, followed by
the backbreaking chore of carrying ir a bucket at a time to a chute that led to
the coal bin), and clean out the ashes and haul them up the basement stairs
and out.
There were other differences. My boys did not have to carry water for baths;
in Kansas City we had running water. And so forth... My sons worked as hard
as my brothers had, but differently. A city house with electricity and gas and a
coal furnace does not create anything like the heavy chores that a country
house in the Gay Nineties did. The house I was brought up in had no running
water, no plumbing of any sort, no central heating. It was lit by coal-oil lamps
and by candles, both homemade and store-bought, and it was heated by
wood stoves: a big baseburner in the parlour, a drum stove in the clinic,
monkey stoves elsewhere. No stoves upstairs... but grilles ser in the ceilings
allowed heated air to reach the upper floor.
Ours was one of the larger houses in town, and possibly the most modern, as
Father was quick to adopt any truly useful new invention as soon as it was
available. In this he consciously imitated Mr Samuel Clemens.
Father judged Mr Clemens to be one of the smartest and possibly the
smartest man in America. Mr Clemens was seventeen years older than
Father; he first became aware of тАЪMark TwainтАЩ with the Jumping Frog story.
From that time on Father read everything by Mr Clemens he could lay hands
on.
The year I was born Father wrote to Mr Clemens, complimenting him on A
Tramp Abroad. Mr Clemens sent a courteous and dryly humorous answer;
Father framed it and hung it on the wall of his clinic. Thereafter Father wrote
to Mr Clemens as each new book by тАЪMark TwainтАЩ appeared. As a direct
result, young Maureen read all of Mr ClemensтАЩ published works, curled up in
a corner of her fatherтАЩs clinic. These were not books that Mother read; she