Now I am strong in
the wrists and weak in the temper; therefore I used the one and spared
the other, and got the trunk down-stairs myself. Halicarnassus heard the
uproar. He must have been deaf not to hear it; for the old ark banged
and bounced, and scraped the paint off the stairs, and pitched
head-foremost into the wall, and gouged out the plastering, and dinted
the mop-board, and was the most stupid, awkward, uncompromising,
unmanageable thing I ever got hold of in my life.
By the time I had zigzagged it into the back chamber, Halicarnassus
loomed up the back stairs. I stood hot and panting, with the inside of
my fingers tortured into burning leather, the skin rasped off three
knuckles, and a bruise on the back of my right hand, where the trunk had
crushed it against a sharp edge of the door-way.
"Now, then?" said Halicarnassus interrogatively.
"To be sure," I replied affirmatively.
He said no more, but went and looked up the garret-stairs. They bore
traces of a severe encounter, that must be confessed.
"Do you want me to give you a bit of advice?" he asked.
"No!" I answered promptly.
"Well, then, here it is. The next time you design to bring a trunk
downstairs, you would better cut away the underpinning, and knock out
the beams, and let the garret down into the cellar.
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