Читать книгу Up in Maine: Stories of Yankee Life Told in Verse - Holman Day - Страница 7

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Now there was Uncle Elnathan Shaw,

—Most regular man you ever saw!

Just half-past four in the afternoon

He’d start and whistle that old jig tune,

Take the big blue jug from the but’ry shelf

And trot down cellar, to draw himself

Old cider enough to last him through

The winter ev’nin’. Two quarts would do.

—Just as regular as half-past four

Come round, he’d tackle that cellar door,

As he had for thutty years or more.

And as regular, too, as he took that jug

Aunt Shaw would yap through her old

mug,

“Now, Nathan, for goodness’ sake take care

You allus trip on the second stair;

It seems as though you were just possessed

To break that jug. It’s the very best

There is in town and you know it, too,

And ’twas left to me by my great-aunt Sue.

For goodness’ sake, why don’t yer lug

A tin dish down, for ye’ll break that jug?”

Allus the same, suh, for thirty years,

Allus the same old twits and jeers

Slammed for the nineteenth thousand time

And still we wonder, my friend, at crime.

But Nathan took it meek’s a pup

And the worst he said was “Please shut up.”

You know what the Good Book says befell

The pitcher that went to the old-time well;

Wal, whether ’twas that or his time had come,

Or his stiff old limbs got weak and numb

Or whether his nerves at last giv’ in

To Aunt Shaw’s everlasting chin—

One day he slipped on that second stair,

Whirled round and grabbed at the empty air.

And clean to the foot of them stairs, ker-smack,

He bumped on the bulge of his humped old back

And he’d hardly finished the final bump

When old Aunt Shaw she giv’ a jump

And screamed downstairs as mad’s a bug

“Dod-rot your hide, did ye break my jug?”

Poor Uncle Nathan lay there flat

Knocked in the shape of an old cocked hat,

But he rubbed his legs, brushed off the dirt

And found after all that he warn’t much hurt.

And he’d saved the jug, for his last wild thought

Had been of that; he might have caught

At the cellar shelves and saved his fall,

But he kept his hands on the jug through all.

And now as he loosed his jealous hug

His wife just screamed, “Did ye break my

jug?”

Not a single word for his poor old bones

Nor a word when she heard his awful groans,

But the blamed old hard-shelled turkle just

Wanted to know if that jug was bust.

Old Uncle Nathan he let one roar

And he shook his fist at the cellar door;

“Did ye break my jug?” she was yellin’ still.

“No, durn yer pelt, but I swow I will.”

And you’d thought that the house was a-going

to fall

When the old jug smashed on the cellar wall.