ambushed him. I waited
till he had climbed the stairs and was near the landing and couldn't
escape. Then I bombarded him with clods, which he warded off with his
tin bucket the best he could, but without much success, for I was a good
marksman. The clods smashing against the weather-boarding fetched my
mother out to see what was the matter, and I tried to explain that I was
amusing Henry. Both of them were after me in a minute, but I knew the
way over that high board fence and escaped for that time. After an hour
or two, when I ventured back, there was no one around and I thought the
incident was closed. But it was not. Henry was ambushing me. With an
unusually competent aim for him, he landed a stone on the side of my
head which raised a bump there that felt like the Matterhorn. I carried
it to my mother straightway for sympathy, but she was not strongly
moved. It seemed to be her idea that incidents like this would
eventually reform me if I harvested enough of them. So the matter was
only educational. I had had a sterner view of it than that, before.

It was not right to give the cat the "Pain-Killer"; I realize it now. I
would not repeat it in these days. But in those "Tom Sawyer" days it was
a great and sincere satisfaction to me to see Peter perform under its
influence--and if actions _do_ speak as loud as words, he took as much
interest in it as I did. It was a most detestable medicine, Perry
Davis's Pain-Killer. Mr. Pavey's negro man, who was a person of good
judgment and considerable curiosity, wanted to sample it, and I let him.
It was his opinion that it was made of hell-fire.

Those were the cholera days of '49. The people along the Mississippi
were paralyzed with fright. Those who could run away, did it. And many
died of fright in the flight. Fright killed three persons where the
cholera killed one. Those who couldn't flee kept themselves drenched
with cholera preventives, and my mother chose Perry Davis's Pain-Killer
for me. She was not distressed about herself. She avoided that kind of
preventive. But she made me promise to take a teaspoonful of Pain-Killer
every day. Originally it was my intention to keep the promise, but at
that time I didn't know as much about Pain-Killer as I knew after my
first experiment with it. She didn't watch Henry's bottle--she could
trust Henry. But she marked my bottle with a pencil, on the label, every
day, and examined it to see if the teaspoonful had been removed. The
floo