“Yes, a little.”
“Fetch it!”
He ran to his room overhead and brought down a bottle
which was two-thirds full. She tilted it up and
took a drink. Her eyes sparkled with satisfaction,
and she tucked the bottle under her shawl, saying,
“It’s prime. I’ll take it along.”
Tom humbly held the door for her, and she marched
out as grim and erect as a grenadier.
Why is it that we
rejoice at a birth and grieve at a
funeral? It is
because we are not the person involved. —
Pudd’nhead Wilson’s
Calendar
It is easy to find fault, if one
has that disposition. There was once a man
who, not being able to find any other fault with
his coal, complained that there were too many prehistoric
toads in it. —Pudd’nhead Wilson’s
Calendar
Tom flung himself on the sofa, and put his throbbing
head in his hands, and rested his elbows on his knees.
He rocked himself back and forth and moaned.
“I’ve knelt to a nigger wench!”
he muttered. “I thought I had struck the
deepest depths of degradation before, but oh, dear,
it was nothing to this. . . . Well, there is
one consolation, such as it is—I’ve
struck bottom this time; there’s nothing lower.”
But that was a hasty conclusion.
At ten that night he climbed the ladder in the haunted
house, pale, weak, and wretched. Roxy was standing
in the door of one of the rooms, waiting, for she
had heard him.
This was a two-story log house which had acquired
the reputation a few years ago of being haunted, and
that was the end of its usefulness. Nobody would
live in it afterward, or go near it by night, and most
people even gave it a wide berth in the daytime.
As it had no competition, it was called the
haunted house. It was getting crazy and ruinous
now, from long neglect. It stood three hundred
yards beyond Pudd’nhead Wilson’s house,
with nothing between but vacancy. It was the
last house in the town at that end.
Tom followed Roxy into the room. She had a pile
of clean straw in the corner for a bed, some cheap
but well-kept clothing was hanging on the wall, there
was a tin lantern freckling the floor with little spots
of light, and there were various soap and candle boxes
scattered about, which served for chairs. The
two sat down. Roxy said:
“Now den, I’ll tell you straight off,
en I’ll begin to k’leck de money later
on; I ain’t in no hurry. What does you reckon
I’s gwine to tell you?”
“Well, you—you—oh, Roxy,
don’t make it too hard for me! Come right
out and tell me you’ve found out somehow what
a shape I’m in on account of dissipation and
foolishness.”
“Disposition en foolishness! NO sir, dat
ain’t it. Dat jist ain’t nothin’
at all, ‘longside o’ what I knows.”
Tom stared at her, and said:
