In Wallula there is a marked feeling of childlike trust and confidence
between people. It is a feature of Wallula society, I may say. The people
of the junction trust strangers to a remarkable extent. In what other town
in this whole republic would a pair of pantaloons be thus left in the
complete power of a total stranger, a stranger, too, to whom pantaloons
were a great boon? I could easily have caught those pantaloons off the
nail, thrust them into my bosom, and fled past the drowsy night clerk, out
into the great, sheltering arms of the silent night, but I did not.
Anon through the long hours I would awake and listen fitfully to the wail
of damned souls, as it seemed to me, the wail of those who tried to stay
there a week, and had starved to death. Here was their favorite wailing
place. Here was the place where damned souls seemed to throw aside all
restraint and have a good time. I tried to keep out the sound by stuffing
the pillow in my ear, but what is a cheap hotel pillow in a man's ear, if
he wants to keep the noise out.
So I lay there and listened to the soft sigh of the bath tub, the loud,
defiant challenge of the athletic butler down stairs, the last weak death
rattle in the throat of the coffee pot in the dining room, and the wail of
the damned souls who had formerly stopped at this hotel, but who had been
rescued at last, and had hilariously gone to perdition, only to come back
at night and torment the poor guest by bragging over the superiority of
hell as a refuge from the Wallula hotel.
Now and then in the night I would almost yield to a wild impulse and catch
those pantaloons off the hook, to rush out and go to Canada with them, and
then I would softly go through the pockets and hang them back again.
It was an awful night. When morning dawned at last, and I took the pillow
out of my ear and looked in the delirious and soap-spattered mirror, I saw
that my beautiful hair, which had been such a source of pride to me ten
years ago, had disappeared in places. I paid my bill, called the attention
of the landlord to the fact that I had not taken those pantaloons and
'betrayed' his trust, and then I went away.
Flying Machines.
A long and exhaustive examination of the history of flying machines
enables me to give briefly some of the main points of a few, for the
benefit of those who may be interested in this science. I give what I do
in order to prepare the public to take advantage of the different methods,
and be ready at once to fly as soon as the weather gets pleasant.
A Frenchman invented a flying-machine, or dofunny, as we scientists would
term it, in 1600 and something, whereby he could sail down from the
woodshed and not break his neck. He could not rise from the ground like a
lark and trill a few notes as he skimmed through the sky, but he could
fall off an ordinary hay stack like a setting hen, with the aid of his
wings. His name was Besnier.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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