“EMMA” UNRATED

Emma Woodhouse, not quite twenty-one years of age, and blessed with a comfortable home and the expectation of an ample income in due time, found herself curious, one spring day, about a young man named Knoxville, the new neighbor across the grange. Frequenters of the village and dispensers of its gossip told extraordinary stories. Mr. Knoxville, they said, had offered the villagers on Michelmas Day last an entertainment he called a “Fire-Hose Rodeo,” in which he suspended a canvas fire hose from a thirty-foot-tall cranelike structure, climbed the structure, clutched the fire hose with both arms and legs near its nozzle, and attempted to hold on as the hose writhed and flapped about with water from the village hydrant rushing through it at extremely high pressure.

- BY IAN FRAZIER

Nor was that all. Mr. Knoxville and several of his young male companions then arranged to be sealed up in a touring carriage to prove that they could remain inside after several others of their companions threw in a nest of enraged bees. The carriage, with a matched pair of bays in harness, was positioned in front of the parsonage, where the cries of the young men soon penetrated the very walls. Though they begged and pleaded and beat against the interior of the carriage so the impressions of their fists could be seen from the outside, their tormentors merely laughed all the louder. Soon the rector himself came out and insisted that Mr. Knoxville and company be released, whereupon he and his fellow-sufferers ran through the streets swatting at themselves with the bees in pursuit.

One could see how such a sequence of events might set the quiet village astir, Emma reflected.