y. "From the Hulks!"

"Oh-h!" said I, looking at Joe. "Hulks!"

Joe gave a reproachful cough, as much as to say, "Well, I told you so."

"And please, what's Hulks?" said I.

"That's the way with this boy!" exclaimed my sister, pointing me out
with her needle and thread, and shaking her head at me. "Answer him one
question, and he'll ask you a dozen directly. Hulks are prison-ships,
right 'cross th' meshes." We always used that name for marshes, in our
country.

"I wonder who's put into prison-ships, and why they're put there?" said
I, in a general way, and with quiet desperation.

It was too much for Mrs. Joe, who immediately rose. "I tell you what,
young fellow," said she, "I didn't bring you up by hand to badger
people's lives out. It would be blame to me and not praise, if I had.
People are put in the Hulks because they murder, and because they rob,
and forge, and do all sorts of bad; and they always begin by asking
questions. Now, you get along to bed!"

I was never allowed a candle to light me to bed, and, as I went up
stairs in the dark, with my head tingling,--from Mrs. Joe's thimble
having played the tambourine upon it, to accompany her last words,--I
felt fearfully sensible of the great convenience that the hulks were
handy for me. I was clearly on my way there. I had begun by asking
questions, and I was going to rob Mrs. Joe.

Since that time, which is far enough away now, I have often thought
that few people know what secrecy there is in the young under terror.
No matter how unreasonable the terror, so that it be terror. I was in
mortal terror of the young man who wanted my heart and liver; I was
in mortal terror of my interlocutor with the iron leg; I was in mortal
terror of myself, from whom an awful promise had been extracted; I had
no hope of deliverance through my all-powerful sister, who repulsed
me at every turn; I am afraid to think of what I might have done on
requirement, in the secrecy of my terror.

If I slept at all that night, it was only to imagine myself drifting
down the river on a strong spring-tide, to the Hulks; a ghostly
pirate calling out to me through a speaking-trumpet, as I passed the
gibbet-station, that I had better come ashore and be hanged there at
once, and not put it off. I was afraid to sleep, even if I had been
inclined, for I knew that at the first faint dawn of morning I must rob
the pantry. There was no doing it in the night, for there was no getting
a light by e