Reading aloud

I'm the organizer of the Read Out Loud Toronto Meetup group. (I usually avoid the hassle of organizing these groups, but it was something I believed in.) We meet every Saturday afternoon at Butler's Pantry in Mirvish Village.  At past events we've read stuff by American writers and opening passages, and this time, with Halloween approaching, we did scary stories. (Next month we'll do poetry.)

Only three people showed up, but that meant I got to read more stuff than usual.  Jane read from Dante's DIVINE COMEDY the part where he's in the inferno's lowest circle.  Collette read one of the ghost stories in Robertson Davies' HIGH SPIRITS, and the part in Dickens' OLIVER TWIST where the undertaker and Oliver come to pick up a dead girl. ("She'll only disturb the worms, not feed them.") And I read the Robert Frost poem "The Witch of Coos"; the Poe story "The Oval Portrait"; the part in Mark Twain's HUCKLEBERRY FINN where his father gets the DTs and almost knifes him; and the Grimm Brothers story "The Willful Child," which goes as follows.

"Once upon a time there was a child who was willful, and would not do what her mother wished.  For this reason God had no pleasure in her, and let her become ill, and no doctor could do her any good, and in a short time she lay on her death-bed.  When she had been lowered into her grave, and the earth had spread over her, all at once her arm came out again, and stretched upwards, and when they had put it in and spread fresh earth over it, it was all to no purpose, for the arm always came out again.  Then the mother herself was obliged to go to the grave, and strike the arm with a rod, and when she had done that, it was drawn in, and then at last the child had rest beneath the ground."