Now The Young Doctor Came To The Rescue.
There Was Delight And Applause When He Proposed To Scare
Nicodemus To
Death, and explained how he was going to do it.
He had a noble new skeleton - the skeleton of the
Late
and only local celebrity, Jimmy Finn, the village
drunkard - a grisly piece of property which he had bought
of Jimmy Finn himself, at auction, for fifty dollars,
under great competition, when Jimmy lay very sick in
the tan-yard a fortnight before his death. The fifty
dollars had gone promptly for whiskey and had considerably
hurried up the change of ownership in the skeleton.
The doctor would put Jimmy Finn's skeleton in Nicodemus's
bed!
This was done - about half past ten in the evening.
About Nicodemus's usual bedtime - midnight - the village
jokers came creeping stealthily through the jimpson
weeds and sunflowers toward the lonely frame den.
They reached the window and peeped in. There sat the
long-legged pauper, on his bed, in a very short shirt,
and nothing more; he was dangling his legs contentedly
back and forth, and wheezing the music of "Camptown Races"
out of a paper-overlaid comb which he was pressing
against his mouth; by him lay a new jewsharp, a new top,
and solid india-rubber ball, a handful of painted marbles,
five pounds of "store" candy, and a well-gnawed slab of
gingerbread as big and as thick as a volume of sheet-music.
He had sold the skeleton to a traveling quack for three
dollars and was enjoying the result!
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 190 of 558
Words from 52389 to 52647
of 156082
