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

In the absence of the others Wildman talked more freely. He was a
spiritualist and tried to make Sam see the beauties of that faith. On long
summer afternoons the grocer and the boy spent hours driving through the
streets in a rattling old delivery wagon, the man striving earnestly to
make clear to the boy the shadowy ideas of God that were in his mind.

Although Windy McPherson had been the leader of a Bible class in his
youth, and had been a moving spirit at revival meetings during his early
days in Caxton, he no longer went to church and his wife did not ask him
to go. On Sunday mornings he lay abed. If there was work to be done about
the house or yard he complained of his wounds. He complained of his wounds
when the rent fell due, and when there was a shortage of food in the
house. Later in his life and after the death of Jane McPherson the old
soldier married the widow of a farmer by whom he had four children and
with whom he went to church twice on Sunday. Kate wrote Sam one of her
infrequent letters about it. "He has met his match," she said, and was
tremendously pleased.

In church on Sunday mornings Sam went regularly to sleep, putting his head
on his mother's arm and sleeping throughout the service. Jane McPherson
loved to have the boy there beside her. It was the one thing in life they
did together and she did not mind his sleeping the time away. Knowing how
late he had been upon the streets at the paper selling on Saturday
evenings, she looked at him with eyes filled with tenderness and sympathy.
Once the minister, a man with brown beard and hard, tightly-closed mouth,
spoke to her. "Can't you keep him awake?" he asked impatiently. "He needs
the sleep," she said and hurried past the minister and out of the church,
looking ahead of her and frowning.

The evening of the evangelist meeting was a summer evening fallen on a
winter month. All day the warm winds had come up from the southwest. Mud
lay soft and deep in the streets and among the little pools of water on
the sidewalks were dry spots from which steam arose. Nature had forgotten
herself. A day that should have sent old fellows to their nests behind
stoves in stores sent them forth to loaf in the sun. The night fell warm
and cloudy. A thunder storm threatened in the month of February.

Sam walked along the sidewalk with his mother bound for the brick church,
wearing a new grey overcoat. The night did not demand the overcoat but Sam
wore it out of an excess of pride in its possession. The overcoat had an
air. It had been made by Gunther the tailor after a design sketched on the
back of a piece of wrapping paper by John Telfer and had been paid for out
of the newsboy's savings. The little German tailor, after a talk with
Valmore and Telfer, had made it at a marvellously low price. Sam swaggered
as he walked.

He did not sleep in church that evening; indeed he found the quiet church
filled with a medley of strange noises. Folding carefully the new coat and
laying it beside him on the seat he looked with interest at the people,