Читать книгу Bill Nye's Chestnuts Old and New - Nye Bill - Страница 21

They bring with them a small son, who is a pale, emaciated little cuss, with a quiet way of catching my three-year-old heifer by the tail and scaring the life out of her that is far beyond his years. His mother thinks he will not live, mayhap, to grow up, and I hope she may not be disappointed. Still he has a good appetite, and one day last summer, besides his meals, he ate:

One pocketful green apples (pippins),

One pocketful green apples (Ben Davis),

Three large steins rhubarb,

One hatful green gooseberries,

Two ginger cookies, without holes,

Three ginger cookies, with holes,

One adult cucumber, with salt on same,

One glass new milk,

Two uncooked hen eggs, on half-shell.

I laid off all that day from haying in order to follow the little rascal around with a lead pencil and a piece of paper and see how much he would eat. That evening I thought what a beautiful night he had selected for his death. The moon was slipping in and out through the frothy, fleece-lined clouds, and I could imagine the angels just behind the battlements putting the celestial bric-a-brac high enough up so that Henry couldn't get hold of it when he came. I had a slow horse concealed behind the barn, with which I intended going for the doctor. It was a horse with which I had failed to get the doctor in time on a similar occasion, and I felt that he could be relied on now.

Night settled down on the riproaring Piscataquis and deepened the shadows at the base of Russell Mountain. The spruce gum tree of the Moosehead Lake region laid aside its work for the day and the common warty toad of the Pine Tree State began to overestimate himself and inflate his person with the bugs of the evening, now and then lighting up his interior with a lightning bug. It was a glorious evening that little Henry had selected and set aside for his death. But he was really the only one in our house who slept well that night, and seemed to wake up thoroughly refreshed. He is still alive as I write and is coming down here in July emptier than ever.

Oh, sir, can you help me? Will you print this poor petition of mine, with the tear-stains on it, and your reply to it in The World and send me a copy of the paper that I can show to Henry's father, who is a cousin of my wife's but otherwise has nothing to which he can point with pride? Yours sincerely,

Eben L. Tewey.

P.S.—I have presumed some on your good nature, because I have been told that you was born here. I am sorry to say that Shirley has never overcome this entirely. It has hurt her with other towns in the State, but you can see yourself that there was no way we could provide against it. My wife sends love, and hopes you will print this letter without giving my name, or if so, with a fictitious name, as they call it, and perhaps it will fall into the hands of those people who come down here every summer with nothing in them but sincere friendship and go home full of victuals. I wish you would put into it some way a piece that says I do not regard a Christmas present of a chalk meershum pipe, with a red celluloid stem, as an offset against a summer's board of a family that has more malaria than good manners. Slap that in, in your genial way, so as not to give offense, and whenever you visit your old birthplace, and want to just let go all holts and have a good time, come right to our house. I have lathed and plastered the cook-room and fitted it up as a kind of Inebriates' Home, and I would feel tickled to death to have you come and see what you think of it.