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Various

"Successful Recitations"

... Then the music changed to water, full
of feeling that couldn't be thought, and began to drop--drip, drop,
drip, drop--clear and sweet, like tears of joy fallin' into a lake of
glory. It was as sweet as a sweetheart sweetn'd with white sugar,
mixed with powdered silver and seed diamonds. It was too sweet. I
tell you, the audience cheered. Rubin, he kinder bowed, like he
wanted to say, 'Much obleeged, but I'd rather you wouldn't interrupt
me.'
"He stopped a minute or two to fetch breath. Then he got mad. He runs
his fingers through his hair, he shoved up his sleeve, he opened his
coat-tails a leetle further, he drug up his stool, he leaned over,
and, sir, he just went for that old pianner. He slapt her face, he
boxed her jaws, he pulled her nose, he pinched her ears, and he
scratched her cheeks till she fairly yelled. She bellowed like a
bull, she bleated like a calf, she howled like a hound, she squealed
like a pig, she shrieked like a rat, and _then_ he wouldn't let her
go. He ran a quarter stretch down the low grounds of the bass, till
he got clean into the bowels of the earth, and you heard thunder
galloping after thunder, thro' the hollows and caves of perdition;
and then he fox-chased his right hand with his left till he got away
out of the treble into the clouds, whar the notes was finer than the
pints of cambric needles, and you couldn't hear nothin' but the
shadders of 'em.


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