Npm: 16611075
"The Furniture That Went Mad"
Mr. Hall has to go back upstairs to get
some sarsaparilla to cover the taste of the watered-down beer (and also because
Wells knows that everyone has trouble spelling "sarsaparilla" and he
likes to torture us). On his way, he notices some strange things: the front
door is unlocked and the stranger isn't in his room. The lady of the house,
Mrs. Hall, comes to check on the situation in the stranger's room. She peeks in
and, after a few sneezes, the blankets and pillows start flying around the
room, and the furniture starts banging around. Mrs. Hall immediately assumes
that the stranger has put ghosts into her furniture. (There's a joke here about
"spirits," which can mean both ghosts and alcohol. Since alcohol goes
into bottles, maybe ghosts could also, and maybe that's what the stranger has
in all of his bottles. At least, that seems to be what Mrs. Hall thinks.)
Some of the villagers – including Sandy
Wadgers, the blacksmith, and Mr. Huxter, the general shop owner – get involved
in the mystery of the stranger's disappearance and the haunted furniture. With
so many people, not much gets done: "The Anglo-Saxon genius for
parliamentary government asserted itself; there was a great deal of talk and no
decisive action" (6.18). Zing! Take that, parliamentary government. Finally,
the stranger comes out of his room and demands to be left alone.
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