Chapter 5

CHAPTER V.

I HAD shut the door to. Then I turned around.
and there he was. I used to be scared of him all
the time, he tanned me so much. I reckoned I was
scared now, too; but in a minute I see I was mistaken
-- that is, after the first jolt, as you may say, when
my breath sort of hitched, he being so unexpected;
but right away after I see I warn't scared of him worth
bothring about.

He was most fifty, and he looked it. His hair was
long and tangled and greasy, and hung down, and you
could see his eyes shining through like he was behind
vines. It was all black, no gray; so was his long,
mixed-up whiskers. There warn't no color in his face,
where his face showed; it was white; not like another
man's white, but a white to make a body sick, a white
to make a body's flesh crawl -- a tree-toad white, a
fish-belly white. As for his clothes -- just rags, that
was all. He had one ankle resting on t'other knee;
the boot on that foot was busted, and two of his toes
stuck through, and he worked them now and then.
His hat was laying on the floor -- an old black slouch
with the top caved in, like a lid.

I stood a-looking at him; he set there a-looking at
me, with his chair tilted back a little. I set the candle
down. I noticed the window was up; so he had clumb
in by the shed. He kept a-looking me all over. By
and by he says:

"Starchy clothes -- very. You think you're a good
deal of a big-bug, DON'T you?"

"Maybe I am, maybe I ain't," I says.

"Don't you give me none o' your lip," says he.
"You've put on considerable many frills since I been
away. I'll take you down a peg before I get done
with you. You're educated, too, they say -- can read
and write. You think you're better'n your father,
now, don't you, because he can't? I'LL take it out of
you. Who told you you might meddle with such
hifalut'n foolishness, hey? -- who told you you could?"

"The widow. She told me."

"The widow, hey? -- and who told the widow she
could put in her shovel about a thing that ain't none of
her business?"

"Nobody never told her."

"Well, I'll learn her how to meddle. And looky
here -- you drop that school, you hear? I'll learn
people to bring up a boy to put on airs over his own
father and let on to be better'n what HE is. You lemme
catch you fooling around that school again, you hear?
Your mother couldn't read, and she couldn't write,
nuther, before she died. None of the family couldn't
before THEY died. I can't; and here you're a-swelling
yourself up like this. I ain't the man to stand it --
you hear? Say, lemme hear you read."

I took up a book and begun something about Gen-
eral Washington and the