"Richard Paul Russo - Nobodys Fool" - читать интересную книгу автора (Russo Richard Paul)

particularly dangerous-looking branches in their neighbors' trees and
recommended costly pruning.

In truth, the trees were so mature, their upper branches so high, so
distant from the elderly eyes that peered up at them, that it was
anybody's guess as to which tree a given limb belonged, whose fault it
would be if it descended.

The business with the trees was just more bad luck, and, as the
residents of North Bath were fond of saying, if it weren't for bad luck
they wouldn't have any at all. This was not strictly true, for the
community owed its very existence to geological good fortune in the
form of several excellent mineral springs, and in colonial days the
village had been a summer resort, perhaps the first in North America,
and had attracted visitors from as far away as Europe. By the year
1800 an enterprising businessman named Jedediah Halsey had built a huge
resort hotel with nearly three hundred guest rooms and named it the
Sans Souci, though the locals had referred to it as Jedediah's Folly,
since everyone knew you couldn't fill three hundred guest rooms in the
middle of what had so recently been wilderness. But fill them Jedediah
Halsey did, and by the 1820s several other lesser hostelries had sprung
up to deal with the overflow, and the dirt roads of the village were
gridlocked with the fancy carriages of people come to take the waters
of Bath (for that was the village's name then, just Bath, the "North"
having been added a century later to distinguish it from another larger
town of the same name in the western part of the state though the
residents of North Bath had stubbornly refused the prefix). And it was
not just the healing mineral waters that people came to take, either,
for when Jedediah Halsey, a religious man, sold the Sans Souci, the new
owner cornered the market in distilled waters as well, and during long
summer evenings the ballroom and drawing rooms of the Sans Souci were

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full of revelers. Bath had become so prosperous that no one noticed
when several other excellent mineral springs were discovered a few
miles north near a tiny community that would become Schuyler Springs,
Bath's eventual rival for healing waters. The owners of the Sans Souci
and the residents of Bath remained literally without care until 1868,
when the unthinkable began to happen and the various mineral springs,
one by one, without warning or apparent reason, began, like luck, to
dry up, and with them the town's wealth and future. As luck (what else
would you call it? ) would have it, the upstart Schuyler Springs was
the immediate beneficiary of Bath's demise. Even though their origin
was the same fault line as the Bath mineral springs', the Schuyler
springs continued to flow merrily, and so the visitors whose fancy
carriages had for so long pulled into the long circular drive before
the front entrance of the Sans Souci now stayed on the road another few
miles and pulled into the even larger and more elegant hotel in