"Mark Twain. Tom Sawyer Abroad (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

enough he was as blind as a bat in a minute.
Then the dervish laughed at him and mocked at him and made fun of him;
and says:
"Good-bye-a man that's blind hain't got no use for jewelry."
And he cleared out with the hundred camels, and left that man to wander
around poor and miserable and friendless the rest of his days in the
Desert.
Jim said he'd bet it was a lesson to him.
"Yes," Tom says, "and like a considerable many lessons a body gets.
They ain't no account, because the thing don't ever happen the same way
again-and can't. The time Hen Scovil fell down the chimbly and crippled
his back for life, everybody said it would be a lesson to him. What kind
of a lesson? How was he going to use it? He couldn't climb chimblies no
more, and he hadn't no more backs to break."
"All de same, Mars Tom, dey IS sich a thing as learnin' by expe'ence.
De Good Book say de burnt chile shun de fire."
"Well, I ain't denying that a thing's a lesson if it's a thing that can
happen twice just the same way. There's lots of such things, and THEY
educate a person, that's what Uncle Abner always said; but there's forty
MILLION lots of the other kind-the kind that don't happen the same way
twice-and they ain't no real use, they ain't no more instructive than the
small-pox. When you've got it, it ain't no good to find out you ought to
been vaccinated, and it ain't no good to git vaccinated afterward, because
the small-pox don't come but once. But, on the other hand, Uncle Abner
said that the person that had took a bull by the tail once had learnt
sixty or seventy times as much as a person that hadn't, and said a person
that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was gitting knowledge that
was always going to be useful to him, and warn't ever going to grow dim or
doubtful. But I can tell you, Jim, Uncle Abner was down on them people
that's all the time trying to dig a lesson out of everything that happens,
no matter whether-"
But Jim was asleep. Tom looked kind of ashamed, because you know a
person always feels bad when he is talking uncommon fine and thinks the
other person is admiring, and that other person goes to sleep that way. Of
course he oughtn't to go to sleep, because it's shabby; but the finer a
person talks the certainer it is to make you sleep, and so when you come
to look at it it ain't nobody's fault in particular; both of them's to
blame.
Jim begun to snore-soft and blubbery at first, then a long rasp, then a
stronger one, then a half a dozen horrible ones like the last water
sucking down the plug-hole of a bath-tub, then the same with more power to
it, and some big coughs and snorts flung in, the way a cow does that is
choking to death; and when the person has got to that point he is at his
level best, and can wake up a man that is in the next block with a
dipperful of loddanum in him, but can't wake himself up although all that
awful noise of his'n ain't but three inches from his own ears. And that is
the curiosest thing in the world, seems to me. But you rake a match to
light the candle, and that little bit of a noise will fetch him. I wish I
knowed what was the reason of that, but there don't seem to be no way to
find out. Now there was Jim alarming the whole Desert, and yanking the