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Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot by Charles Heber Clark
page 53 of 304 (17%)
in the fire-place to clean the soot out of the chimbly. And when he
touched her off, Bill was blowed over agin the Baptist church steeple,
and he landed on the weather-cock with his pants torn, and they
couldn't git him down for three days, so he hung there, going round
and round with the wind, and he lived by eating the crows that came
and sat on him, because they thought he was made of sheet-iron and put
up there on purpose.

"He's had more fun than enough. He was telling me the other day about
a sausage-stuffer his brother invented. It was a kinder machine that
worked with a treadle; and Bill said the way they did in the fall was
to fix it on the hog's back, and connect the treadle with a string,
and then the hog'd work the treadle and keep on running it up and down
until the machine cut the hog all up fine and shoved the meat into the
skins. Bill said his brother called it 'Every Hog His Own Stuffer,'
and it worked splendid. But I do' know. 'Pears to me 'sif there
couldn't be no machine like that. But anyway, Bill said so.

"And he told me about an uncle of his out in Australia who was et by a
big oyster once; and when, he got inside, he stayed there until he'd
et the oyster. Then he split the shell open and took half a one for a
boat, and he sailed along until he met a sea-serpent, and he killed it
and drawed off its skin, and when he got home he sold it to an engine
company for a hose, for forty thousand dollars, to put out fires with.
Bill said that was actually so, because he could show me a man who
used to belong to the engine company. I wish father'd let me go out
to find a sea-serpent like that; but he don't let me have a chance to
distinguish myself.

"Bill was saying only yesterday that the Indians caught him once and
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