Three men in a boat / Трое в лодке, не считая собаки. Книга для чтения на английском языке

“Where’s the hammer? What did I do with the hammer? Great heavens! Seven of you, being round there, and you don’t know what I did with the hammer!”

We would find the hammer for him, and then he would have lost sight[32 - to lose sight of smb / smth – потерять из виду кого-либо / что-либо] of the mark he had made on the wall, where the nail was to go in, and each of us had to get up on the chair, beside him, and see if we could find it; and we would each discover it in a different place, and he would call us all fools, one after another, and tell us to get down.

At last, Uncle Podger would get the spot fixed again, and put the point of the nail on it with his left hand, and take the hammer in his right hand. And, with the first blow, he would smash his thumb, and drop the hammer, with a yell, on somebody’s toes.

Aunt Maria would mildly observe that, next time Uncle Podger was going to hammer a nail into the wall, she hoped he’d let her know in time, so that she could make arrangements to go and spend a week with her mother while it was being done.

“Oh! you women, you make such a fuss[33 - to make a fuss – поднимать шум] over everything,” Uncle Podger would reply. “Why, I like doing a little job of this sort.”

And then he would have another try, and, at the second blow, the nail would go clean through the plaster, and half the hammer after it. Then we had to find the rule and the string again, and a new hole was made;

and, about midnight, the picture would be up – very crooked and insecure, and everybody dead beat and wretched[34 - dead beat and wretched – устали и валятся с ног] – except Uncle Podger.

“There you are,” he would say, stepping heavily off the chair and surveying the mess he had made with evident pride. “Why, some people would have had a man in to do a little thing like that!”

Harris will be just that sort of man when he grows up, I know, and I told him so.

I said:

“No; you get the paper, and the pencil, and the catalogue, and George write down, and I’ll do the work.”

The first list we made out had to be torn up. It was clear that the Thames would not allow of the navigation of a boat large enough to take the things we had written down.

George said:

“You know we are on a wrong way altogether.