"Шервуд Андерсен. Сын Винди МакФерсон (engl) " - читать интересную книгу автора

jewelry store. At the hall other boys stood in the stairway or ran up and
down the sidewalk talking excitedly, but Sam was a figure in the town's
life and his right to push in among the men was not questioned. He
squirmed through the mass of legs and secured a seat in a window ledge
where he could watch the men come in and find seats.

As Caxton's one newsboy Sam had got from his newspaper selling both a
living and a kind of standing in the town's life. To be a newsboy or a
bootblack in a small novel-reading American town is to make a figure in
the world. Do not all of the poor newsboys in the books become great men
and is not this boy who goes among us so industriously day after day
likely to become such a figure? Is it not a duty we of the town owe to
future greatness that we push him forward? So reasoned the men of Caxton
and paid a kind of court to the boy who sat on the window ledge of the
hall while the other boys of the town waited on the sidewalk below.

John Telfer was chairman of the mass meeting. He was always chairman of
public meetings in Caxton. The industrious silent men of position in the
town envied his easy, bantering style of public address, while pretending
to treat it with scorn. "He talks too much," they said, making a virtue of
their own inability with apt and clever words.

Telfer did not wait to be appointed chairman of the meeting, but went
forward, climbed the little raised platform at the end of the hall, and
usurped the chairmanship. He walked up and down on the platform bantering
with the crowd, answering gibes, calling to well-known men, getting and
giving keen satisfaction with his talent. When the hall was filled with
men he called the meeting to order, appointed committees and launched into
a harangue. He told of plans made to advertise the big day in other towns
and to get low railroad rates arranged for excursion parties. The
programme, he said, included a musical carnival with brass bands from
other towns, a sham battle by the military company at the fairgrounds,
horse races, speeches from the steps of the town hall, and fireworks in
the evening. "We'll show them a live town here," he declared, walking up
and down the platform and swinging his cane, while the crowd applauded and
shouted its approval.

When a call came for voluntary subscriptions to pay for the fun, the
audience quieted down. One or two men got up and started to go out,
grumbling that it was a waste of money. The fate of the celebration was on
the knees of the gods.

Telfer arose to the occasion. He called out the names of the departing,
and made jests at their expense so that they dropped back into their
chairs unable to face the roaring laughter of the crowd, and shouted to a
man at the back of the hall to close and bolt the door. Men began getting
up in various parts of the hall and calling out sums, Telfer repeating the
name and the amount in a loud voice to young Tom Jedrow, clerk in the
bank, who wrote them down in a book. When the amount subscribed did not
meet with his approval, he protested and the crowd backing him up forced