Смешные рассказы / The Funny Stories - стр. 5

“After that we had a most tranquil season during three months. The bill was impressive, of course, and I had said I would not pay it until the new machinery had proved itself to be flawless. The time set was three months. So I paid the bill, and the very next day the alarm went to buzzing like ten thousand bee swarms at ten o’clock in the morning. I turned the hands around twelve hours, according to instructions, and this took off the alarm. But it happened again at night, and I had to set it ahead twelve hours once more to get it to put the alarm on again. That sort of nonsense went on a week or two, then the expert came up and put in a new clock. He came up every three months during the next three years, and put in a new clock. But it was always a failure. His clocks all had the same defect: they would put the alarm on in the daytime, and they would not put it on at night; and if you forced it on yourself, they would take it off again the minute your back was turned.

“Now there is the history of that burglar alarm – everything just as it happened. Yes, sir, and when I had slept nine years with burglars, and maintained an expensive burglar alarm the whole time, for their protection, not mine, I just said to Mrs. McWilliams that I had had enough; so with her full consent I took the whole thing out and traded it off for a dog, and shot the dog. I don’t know what you think about it, Mr. Twain; but I think those things are made solely in the interest of the burglars. Good-bye: I get off here.”

Seriously, from early youth I have taken a special interest in the subject of poultry-raising, and so this membership touches me. Even as a schoolboy, poultry-raising was a study with me, and I may say that as early as the age of seventeen I was acquainted with all the best and quickest methods of raising chickens, from raising them by burning matches under their noses, down to lifting them off a fence on a frosty night by putting the end of a warm board under their heels. By the time I was twenty years old, I really suppose I had raised more poultry than any one individual in all the section round about there. The very chickens came to know my talent by and by. The youth of both sexes stopped to paw the earth for worms, and old roosters stopped to crow, when I passed by.

I have had so much experience in the raising of fowls that I cannot but think that a few hints from me might be useful to the society. The two methods I have already touched upon are very simple, and are only used in the raising of the commonest class of fowls; one is for summer, the other for winter.

In the one case you start out with a friend along about eleven o’clock’ on a summer’s night (not later, because in some states – especially in California and Oregon – chickens always wake up just at midnight and crow from ten to thirty minutes, according to the ease or difficulty they experience in getting the public waked up), and your friend carries with him a sack. Arrived at the henroost (your neighbor’s, not your own), you light a match and hold it under first one and then another bird’s nose until they are willing to go into that bag without making any trouble about it. You then return home, either taking the bag with you or leaving it behind, according to the circumstances. N. B. – I have seen the time when it was appropriate to leave the sack behind and walk off with considerable velocity, without ever leaving any word where to send it.