33 лучших юмористических рассказа на английском / 33 Best Humorous Short Stories

“Your imagination is all right, and New York is neither heaven nor the other place. The fact is, I’m spooking, and I can tell you, Austin, it’s just about the finest kind of work there is. If you could manage to shuffle off your mortal coil and get in with a lot of ghosts, the way I have, you’d be playing in great luck.”

�“Thanks for the hint, Hawley,” I said, with a grateful smile; “but, to tell you the truth, I do not find that life is entirely bad. I get my three meals a day, keep my pocket full of coin, and sleep eight hours every night on a couch that couldn’t be more desirable if it were studded with jewels and had mineral springs.

”

�“That’s your mortal ignorance, Austin,” he retorted. “I lived long enough to appreciate the necessity of being ignorant, but your style of existence is really not to be mentioned in the same cycle with mine. You talk about three meals a day, as if that were an ideal; you forget that with the eating your labor is just begun; those meals have to be digested, every one of ’em, and if you could only understand it, it would appall you to see what a fearful wear and tear that act of digestion is.

In my life you are feasting all the time, but with no need for digestion. You speak of money in your pockets; well, I have none, yet am I the richer of the two. I don’t need money. The world is mine. If I chose to I could pour the contents of that jeweller’s window into your lap in five seconds, but cui bono? The gems delight my eye quite as well where they are; and as for travel, Austin, of which you have always been fond, the spectral method beats all. Just watch me!”

�I watched him as well as I could for a minute,’ said 5010; �and then he disappeared. In another minute he was before me again.

�“Well,” I said, “I suppose you’ve been around the block in that time, eh?”

�He roared with laughter. “Around the block?” he ejaculated. “I have done the Continent of Europe, taken a run through China, haunted the Emperor of Japan, and sailed around the Horn since I left you a minute ago.

”

�He was a truthful boy in spite of his peculiarities, Hawley was,’ said Surrennes, quietly, �so I had to believe what he said. He abhorred lies.’

�That was pretty fast travelling, though,’ said I. �He’d make a fine messenger-boy.’

�That’s so. I wish I’d suggested it to him,’ smiled my host. �But I can tell you, sir, I was astonished.