Chapter 39 - Page 2

with the tongs. And if she
turned over and found one in bed she would scramble
out and lift a howl that you would think the house was
afire. She disturbed the old man so that he said he
could most wish there hadn't ever been no snakes
created. Why, after every last snake had been gone
clear out of the house for as much as a week Aunt
Sally warn't over it yet; she warn't near over it; when
she was setting thinking about something you could
touch her on the back of her neck with a feather and
she would jump right out of her stockings. It was
very curious. But Tom said all women was just so.
He said they was made that way for some reason or
other.

We got a licking every time one of our snakes come
in her way, and she allowed these lickings warn't noth-
ing to what she would do if we ever loaded up the
place again with them. I didn't mind the lickings,
because they didn't amount to nothing; but I minded
the trouble we had to lay in another lot. But we got
them laid in, and all the other things; and you never
see a cabin as blithesome as Jim's was when they'd all
swarm out for music and go for him. Jim didn't like
the spiders, and the spiders didn't like Jim; and so
they'd lay for him, and make it mighty warm for him.
And he said that between the rats and the snakes and
the grindstone there warn't no room in bed for him,
skasely; and when there was, a body couldn't sleep, it
was so lively, and it was always lively, he said, because
THEY never all slept at one time, but took turn about,
so when the snakes was asleep the rats was on deck,
and when the rats turned in the snakes come on watch,
so he always had one gang under him, in his way, and
t'other gang having a circus over him, and if he got
up to hunt a new place the spiders would take a chance
at him as he crossed over. He said if he ever got out
this time he wouldn't ever be a prisoner again, not for
a salary.

Well, by the end of three weeks everything was in
pretty good shape. The shirt was sent in early, in a
pie, and every time a rat bit Jim he would get up and
write a little in his journal whilst the ink was fresh; the
pens was made, the inscriptions and so on was all
carved on the grindstone; the bed-leg was sawed in
two, and we had et up the sawdust, and it give us a
most amazing stomach-ache. We reckoned we was all
going to die, but didn't. It was the most undigestible
sawdust I ever see; and Tom said the same. But as I
was saying, we'd got all the work done now, at last;
and we was all pretty much fagged out, too, but mainly
Jim. The old man had wrote a couple of times to the
plantation below Orleans to come and get their run-
away nigger, but hadn't got no answer, because