It was
blowing great guns from the west, and the blasts of air,
intermittent in their force, that came up through the flues were
such that under other circumstances they would have annoyed me
tremendously. Almost everything in the line of the current that
issued from the register and passed diagonally across the room to my
fireplace, and so on up the chimney, was disturbed. The effect upon
particles of paper and the fringes on my chairs was almost that of a
pneumatic tube on substances placed within it, and on one or two
occasions I was seriously apprehensive of the manner in which the
flames on the hearth leaped upward into the sooty heights of my
chimney flues.
But when, as happened shortly, I suddenly became conscious that my
spectre cockney had materialized, all my fears for the safety of my
house fled, and I surreptitiously turned off the heat, so that once
he got within range of the register I could turn it on again, and
his annihilation would be as instantaneous as what my newspaper
friends call an electrocution. And that was precisely where I made
my mistake, although I must confess that what ensued when I got the
nauseating creature within range was most delightful.
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