punched me in the ribs, and winked, and whispered
behind his hand, "Any more sprees on hand, Bob?" I was disgusted, and
didn't say anything. If he'd been a boy of my size just then, things
would have been different; but Pop is a kind of man it isn't pleasant to
offend. I smiled in a sickly way, but I was never more disgusted in my
life. Any more sprees! I should think not. I'll leave it to any one if
his kind of sprees pay. "Count me in for the next racket, Bob," he said
at the breakfast table, and then he winked again. I declare I was that
sick I let my buckwheat cake get cold.

Here's the way it was. We live in a nobby kind of place, you see. Almost
everybody owns his own house and grounds, and spends all his spare time
in fixing up. Most of the gentlemen go over to New York to business
every day, but before they go, and after they come back, they're always
fussing around, making little alterations, and what they call
improvements. It makes 'em awful mad if the place is out of order the
seventieth part of an inch. The ladies raise flowers, fix baskets and
roses, and all that kind of gimcracks, and the men go pottering about,
making more fuss over their plots of ground than a big farmer out West
does over his thousands of acres. Well, we boys get together sometimes
and arrange everything to suit ourselves. In a single night it'll be
like a transformation scene at a pantomime--maybe not so pretty, but
every bit as funny. Fun! We've laughed ready to split our sides to see
the poor old barber come limping up for his pole in front of the
doctor's, and the doctor go blustering down there for his hitching post;
a lot of paving-stones against the door of the real-estate office, and
the cows and chickens running loose about town.

But this particular lark was what we called a specialty. Only gates were
to be touched, and these were to undergo a regular tribulation. The
weather was about right--muggy--and the mud in some places knee-deep. We
arranged all the preliminaries at recess, and Tom Jones was to go around
about nine o'clock and let us know if the coast was clear; but he wasn't
to give our regular call--all the place knows that. It goes something in
this way, "Ki-yuah-yuah, yoo-o," with a prolonged howl at the end. We
always drop it when anything secret's on hand. It was agreed upon that
Tom Jones should go to each house, if all was right, and have a coughing
and sneezing spell that wouldn't arouse suspicion; then we we