The Booming of Acre Hill, and Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban LifeBangs, John Kendrick
General
The Booming of Acre Hill, and Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life
Bangs, John Kendrick
City and town life -- Fiction; Suburban life -- Fiction
After two years of glory the social light of Acre Hill went out. The
Acre Hill Land Improvement Company retired from the business. All its
lots were sold, and, of course, there was no further need for the
services of Jocular Jimson Jones. His efforts were crowned with success.
His mission was accomplished, but he moved away--I think regretfully,
for, after all, he had found the Acre Hill people a most likable
lot--but it was inevitable that, there being no more fish to catch, the
anglers needed no bait, and Jocular Jimson had to go. Where he has gone
to there is no one who knows. He has disappeared wholly, even in the
metropolis, and, most unfortunately for Acre Hill, with Jocular Jimson
Jones have departed also all its social glories. None of the elect come
to its dances any more. The amateur thespians of the exclusive set no
longer play on the stage of its club-house, and it was only last week
that Mrs. John Jacob Wintergreen passed Mr. Scraggs on the street with a
cold glare of unrecognition.
Possibly when Acre Hill reads this it will understand, possibly not.
Dumfries Corners people understood it right along, but then they always
were a most suspicious lot, and fond of an amusing spectacle that cost
them nothing.
THE STRANGE MISADVENTURES OF AN ORGAN
Carson was a philosopher, and on the whole it was a great blessing that
he was so. No man needed to be possessor of a philosophical temperament
more than he, for, in addition to being a resident of Dumfries Corners,
Carson had other troubles which, to an excitable nature, would have made
life a prolonged period of misery. He was the sort of a man to whom
irritating misfortunes of the mosquito order have a way of coming. To
some of us it seemed as if a spiteful Nature took pleasure in pelting
Carson with petty annoyances, none of them large enough to excite
compassion, many of them of a sort to provoke a quiet smile. Of all the
dogs in the neighborhood it was always his dog that got run into the
pound, although it was equally true that Carson's dog was one of the few
that were properly licensed. If he bought a new horse something would
happen to it before a week had elapsed; and how his coachman once ripped
off the top of his depot wagon by driving it under a loose telephone
wire is still one of the stories of the vicinity in which he lives.
Anything out of the way in the shape of trouble seemed to choose the
Carson household for experimental purposes. He was the medium by which
new varieties of irritations were introduced to an ungrateful world, but
such was his nature that, given the companionship of Herbert Spencer and
a cigar, he could be absolutely counted on not to murmur.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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