A Tramp Abroad - The Original Classic Edition. Twain Mark

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       the glare of the moon a party of barefooted children were swinging on those chains and having a noisy good time. They were not the first ones who have done that; even their great-great-grandfathers had not been the

       first to do it when they were children. The strokes of the bare feet

       had worn grooves inches deep in the stone flags; it had taken many

       generations of swinging children to accomplish that.

       Everywhere in the town were the mold and decay that go with antiquity, and evidence of it; but I do not know that anything else gave us so

       vivid a sense of the old age of Heilbronn as those footworn grooves in the paving-stones.

       CHAPTER XIII

       [My Long Crawl in the Dark]

       When we got back to the hotel I wound and set the pedometer and put it in my pocket, for I was to carry it next day and keep record of the

       miles we made. The work which we had given the instrument to do during the day which had just closed had not fatigued it perceptibly.

       We were in bed by ten, for we wanted to be up and away on our tramp homeward with the dawn. I hung fire, but Harris went to sleep at once. I hate a man who goes to sleep at once; there is a sort of indefinable

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       something about it which is not exactly an insult, and yet is an insolence; and one which is hard to bear, too. I lay there fretting over this injury, and trying to go to sleep; but the harder I tried, the wider awake I grew. I got to feeling very lonely in the dark, with no

       company but an undigested dinner. My mind got a start by and by, and began to consider the beginning of every subject which has ever been thought of; but it never went further than the beginning; it was touch

       and go; it fled from topic to topic with a frantic speed. At the end of

       an hour my head was in a perfect whirl and I was dead tired, fagged out.

       The fatigue was so great that it presently began to make some head against the nervous excitement; while imagining myself wide awake, I

       would really doze into momentary unconsciousness, and come suddenly out of it with a physical jerk which nearly wrenched my joints apart--the delusion of the instant being that I was tumbling backward over a

       precipice. After I had fallen over eight or nine precipices and thus

       found out that one half of my brain had been asleep eight or nine times without the wide-awake, hard-working other half suspecting it, the periodical unconsciousnesses began to extend their spell gradually over more of my brain-territory, and at last I sank into a drowse which grew deeper and deeper and was doubtless just on the very point of being a solid, blessed dreamless stupor, when--what was that?

       My dulled faculties dragged themselves partly back to life and took a receptive attitude. Now out of an immense, a limitless distance, came

       a something which grew and grew, and approached, and presently was recognizable as a sound--it had rather seemed to be a feeling, before.

       This sound was a mile away, now--perhaps it was the murmur of a storm;

       and now it was nearer--not a quarter of a mile away; was it the muffled

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       rasping and grinding of distant machinery? No, it came still nearer; was it the measured tramp of a marching troop? But it came nearer still,

       and still nearer--and at last it was right in the room: it was merely

       a mouse gnawing the woodwork. So I had held my breath all that time for

       such a trifle.

       Well, what was done could not be helped; I would go to sleep at once and make up the lost time. That was a thoughtless thought. Without intending it--hardly knowing it--I fell to listening intently to that sound, and

       even unconsciously counting the strokes of the mouse's nutmeg-grater. Presently I was deriving exquisite suffering from this employment, yet maybe I could have endured it if the mouse had attended steadily to

       his work; but he did not do that; he stopped every now and then, and I

       suffered more while waiting and listening for him to begin again than I did while he was gnawing. Along at first I was mentally offering a reward of five--six--seven--ten--dollars for that mouse; but toward

       the last I was offering rewards which were entirely beyond my means. I

       close-reefed my ears--that is to say, I bent the flaps of them down and furled them into five or six folds, and pressed them against the hearing-orifice--but it did no good: the faculty was so sharpened

       by nervous excitement that it was become a microphone and could hear through the overlays without trouble.

       My anger grew to a frenzy. I finally did what all persons before me have done, clear back to Adam,--resolved to throw something. I reached down and got my walking-shoes, then sat up in bed and listened, in order to exactly locate the noise. But I couldn't do it; it was as unlocatable as

       a cricket's noise; and where one thinks that that is, is always the very

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       place where it isn't. So I presently hurled a shoe at random, and with a vicious vigor. It struck the wall over Harris's head and fell down on him; I had not imagined I could throw so far. It woke Harris, and I was glad of it until I found he was not angry; then I was sorry. He soon

       went to sleep again, which pleased me; but straightway the mouse began again, which roused my temper once more. I did not want to wake Harris a second time, but the gnawing continued until I was compelled to throw the other shoe.

       This time I broke a mirror--there were two in the room--I got the largest one, of course. Harris woke again, but did not complain, and I was sorrier than ever. I resolved that I would suffer all possible torture before I would disturb him a third time.

       The mouse eventually retired, and by and by I was sinking to sleep, when a clock began to strike; I counted till it was done, and was about to drowse again when another clock began; I counted; then the two great

       RATHHAUS clock angels began to send forth soft, rich, melodious blasts from their long trumpets. I had never heard anything that was so lovely,

       or weird, or mysterious--but when they got to blowing the quarter-hours, they seemed to me to be overdoing the thing. Every time I dropped

       off for the moment, a new noise woke me. Each time I woke I missed my

       coverlet, and had to reach down to the floor and get it again.

       At last all sleepiness forsook me. I recognized the fact that I was hopelessly and permanently wide awake. Wide awake, and feverish and thirsty. When I had lain tossing there as long as I could endure it, it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to dress and go out in the

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       great square and take a refreshing wash in the fountain, and smoke СКАЧАТЬ