GalaDays Author:Gail Hamilton Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Gala-days. garret. there was a great noise in our house, — a thumping and battering and grating. It was my own self dragging my big trunk down from the I d... more »id it myself because I wanted it done. If I had said, " Halicarnassus, will you fetch my trunk down ? " he would have asked me what trunk ? and what did I want of it ? and would not the other one be better? and couldn't I wait till after dinner ? — and so the trunk would probably have had a three-days journey from garret to basement. 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 oft' the stairs, and pitched head-foremost into the wall, and gouged out the plastering, and dinted themop-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 rubbed 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 doorway. " 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 wish 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 down-stairs, you would better cut away the underpinning, and knock out the beams, and let the garret down int...« less