Читать книгу Art of quitting smoking. Quitting smoking is easy - Dmitry Zubenko - Страница 5

It happened that a homeless man lost his humble shelter in the woods. The weather was cool and he urgently needed a way to resolve the roof over his head. But the problem was that he seemed to be an awfully greedy man in the neighborhood. Painfully greedy. That’s why he wasn’t destined to find shelter with his closest neighbors. The homeless man was sitting there thinking:

– The one on the left, I pitied a piece of bun we found together, and the one by the river probably still remembers me not sharing a bottle of wine with him. I don’t think we should even try to ask these kind people for help.

So he reasoned until he remembered that there was another very greedy homeless man a couple of miles away from his pit, but his character was even heavier, and his greed was said to have no limit. But the cold was already approaching and, sighing, the homeless man went in search.

Late at night he reached the hut, which was rumored to have been abandoned for many years, the owner being so greedy. Our hero approached the window and hesitated to look through it. He saw how the owner of the hut, having put on a minimum wick of kerosene lamp, in a dim light counted coins, which he managed to squeeze out for a day. The guest got up the courage and knocked on the door. Surprisingly, the owner invited him under the roof and, scattered indicating the place in the corner, continued to count his wealth, occasionally and with suspicion looking at the uninvited.

The silence dragged on, and it was necessary to start the conversation somehow:

– Why did you twist the wick so hard? – asked the guest from his master.

– The lamp spends too much kerosene, and I’d rather spoil my eyesight than pour a hundred grams of extra fuel into it.

The guest got stingy with the owner’s stinginess and made himself comfortable by lighting a cigarette.

The owner of the hut finished counting his income and, raising his head from his penny, asked the guest to buy him a cigarette.

– Hey, you’ve got a whole block of these on your shelf over there! I’m uninvited, but I have a lot less tobacco than you do. Why don’t you open one of these packs?

The owner looked at the shelf and, tired of breathing, answered:

– What about it? If I smoke them, they’ll run out. They’ve been standing there for a year now.

The homeless were so surprised by their greed that they couldn’t stand it and laughed. Since then, they’ve been willing to share tobacco, but only with each other.