The Classic Humor MEGAPACK ®. Эдгар Аллан По

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СКАЧАТЬ answered the young man, smiling triumphantly down at the girl by his side. He was astonished, and rather pleased, too, to find her suddenly embarrassed and blushing prettily.

      “I believe, then,” announced Aunt Sarah, after due deliberation, “that you may now kiss our niece; may he not, Sisters Ann and Matilda?”

      “He may!” eagerly assented the others.

      “Very well, then, proceed,” commanded Aunt Sarah, folding her arms.

      The young man hastily braced himself to meet this new shock, then gazed down at the girl again. She was still blushing in her newly-found self-conscious femininity, but she trustingly held up her pretty lips to him, looking full into his eyes with the steady flame of her love burning unveiled—and he kissed her.

      “Ah-h-h-h!” sighed the three man-hating spinsters in ecstatic unison.

      THE ANGEL OF THE ODD, by Edgar Allan Poe

      It was a chilly November afternoon. I had just consummated an unusually hearty dinner, of which the dyspeptic truffe formed not the least important item, and was sitting alone in the dining-room with my feet upon the fender and at my elbow a small table which I had rolled up to the fire, and upon which were some apologies for dessert, with some miscellaneous bottles of wine, spirit, and liqueur. In the morning I had been reading Glover’s Leonidas, Wilkie’s Epigoniad, Lamartine’s Pilgrimage, Barlow’s Columbiad, Tuckerman’s Sicily, and Griswold’s Curiosities, I am willing to confess, therefore, that I now felt a little stupid. I made effort to arouse myself by frequent aid of Lafitte, and all failing, I betook myself to a stray newspaper in despair. Having carefully perused the column of “Houses to let,” and the column of “Dogs lost,” and then the columns of “Wives and apprentices runaway,” I attacked with great resolution the editorial matter, and reading it from beginning to end without understanding a syllable, conceived the possibility of its being Chinese, and so re-read it from the end to the beginning, but with no more satisfactory result. I was about throwing away in disgust

      This folio of four pages, happy work Which not even critics criticise,

      when I felt my attention somewhat aroused by the paragraph which follows:

      “The avenues to death are numerous and strange. A London paper mentions the decease of a person from a singular cause. He was playing at ‘puff the dart,’ which is played with a long needle inserted in some worsted, and blown at a target through a tin tube. He placed the needle at the wrong end of the tube, and drawing his breath strongly to puff the dart forward with force, drew the needle into his throat. It entered the lungs, and in a few days killed him.”

      Upon seeing this I fell into a great rage, without exactly knowing why. “This thing,” I exclaimed, “is a contemptible falsehood—a poor hoax—the lees of the invention of some pitiable penny-a-liner, of some wretched concocter of accidents in Cocaigne. These fellows knowing the extravagant gullibility of the age set their wits to work in the imagination of improbable possibilities, of odd accidents as they term them, but to a reflecting intellect (like mine, I added, in parenthesis, putting my forefinger unconsciously to the side of my nose), to a contemplative understanding such as I myself possess, it seems evident at once that the marvelous increase of late in these ‘odd accidents’ is by far the oddest accident of all. For my own part, I intend to believe nothing henceforward that has anything of the ‘singular’ about it.”

      “Mein Gott, den, vat a vool you bees for dat!” replied one of the most remarkable voices I ever heard. At first I took it for a rumbling in my ears—such as a man sometimes experiences when getting very drunk—but upon second thought, I considered the sound as more nearly resembling that which proceeds from an empty barrel beaten with a big stick; and, in fact, this I should have concluded it to be, but for the articulation of the syllables and words. I am by no means naturally nervous, and the very few glasses of Lafitte which I had sipped served to embolden me a little, so that I felt nothing of trepidation, but merely uplifted my eyes with a leisurely movement and looked carefully around the room for the intruder. I could not, however, perceive any one at all.

      “Humph!” resumed the voice as I continued my survey, “you mus pe so dronk as de pig den for not zee me as I zit here at your zide.”

      Hereupon I bethought me of looking immediately before my nose, and there, sure enough, confronting me at the table sat a personage nondescript, although not altogether indescribable. His body was a wine-pipe or a rum puncheon, or something of that character, and had a truly Falstaffian air. In its nether extremity were inserted two kegs, which seemed to answer all the purposes of legs. For arms there dangled from the upper portion of the carcass two tolerably long bottles with the necks outward for hands. All the head that I saw the monster possessed of was one of those Hessian canteens which resemble a large snuff-box with a hole in the middle of the lid. This canteen (with a funnel on its top like a cavalier cap slouched over the eyes) was set on edge upon the puncheon, with the hole toward myself; and through this hole, which seemed puckered up like the mouth of a very precise old maid, the creature was emitting certain rumbling and grumbling noises which he evidently intended for intelligible talk.

      “I zay,” said he, “you mos pe dronk as de pig, vor zit dare and not zee me zit ere; and I zay, doo, you mos pe pigger vool as de goose, vor to dispelief vat iz print in de print. ’Tiz de troof—dat it iz—ebery vord ob it.”

      “Who are you, pray?” said I with much dignity, although somewhat puzzled; “how did you get here? and what is it you are talking about?”

      “As vor ow I com’d ere,” replied the figure, “dat iz none of your pizziness; and as vor vat I be talking apout, I be talk apout vat I tink proper; and as vor who I be, vy dat is de very ting I com’d here for to let you zee for yourself.”

      “You are a drunken vagabond,” said I, “and I shall ring the bell and order my footman to kick you into the street.”

      “He! he! he!” said the fellow, “hu! hu! hu! dat you can’t do.”

      “Can’t do!” said I, “what do you mean? I can’t do what?”

      “Ring de pell,” he replied, attempting a grin with his little villainous mouth.

      Upon this I made an effort to get up in order to put my threat into execution, but the ruffian just reached across the table very deliberately, and hitting me a tap on the forehead with the neck of one of the long bottles, knocked me back into the armchair from which I had half arisen. I was utterly astounded, and for a moment was quite at a loss what to do. In the meantime he continued his talk.

      “You zee,” said he, “it iz te bess vor zit still; and now you shall know who I pe. Look at me! zee! I am te Angel ov te Odd.”

      “And odd enough, too,” I ventured to reply; “but I was always under the impression that an angel had wings.”

      “Te wing!” he cried, highly incensed, “vat I pe do mit te wing? Mein Gott! do you take me for a shicken?”

      “No—oh, no!” I replied, much alarmed; “you are no chicken—certainly not.”

      “Well, den, zit still and pehabe yourself, or I’ll rap you again mid me vist. It iz te shicken ab te wing, und te owl ab te wing, und te imp ab te wing, und te head-teuffel ab te wing. Te angel ab not te wing, and I am te Angel ov te Odd.”

      “And your business with me at present is—is—”

      “My pizziness!” ejaculated the thing, “vy vat a low-bred puppy you mos pe vor СКАЧАТЬ