everybody said it would be a lesson to him. What kind
of a lesson? How was he going to use it? He couldn't climb chimblies no
more, and he hadn't no more backs to break."

"All de same, Mars Tom, dey IS sich a thing as learnin' by expe'ence. De
Good Book say de burnt chile shun de fire."

"Well, I ain't denying that a thing's a lesson if it's a thing that can
happen twice just the same way. There's lots of such things, and THEY
educate a person, that's what Uncle Abner always said; but there's forty
MILLION lots of the other kind--the kind that don't happen the same way
twice--and they ain't no real use, they ain't no more instructive than
the small-pox. When you've got it, it ain't no good to find out you
ought to been vaccinated, and it ain't no good to git vaccinated
afterward, because the small-pox don't come but once. But, on the other
hand, Uncle Abner said that the person that had took a bull by the tail
once had learnt sixty or seventy times as much as a person that hadn't,
and said a person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was
gitting knowledge that was always going to be useful to him, and warn't
ever going to grow dim or doubtful. But I can tell you, Jim, Uncle Abner
was down on them people that's all the time trying to dig a lesson out
of everything that happens, no matter whether--"

But Jim was asleep. Tom looked kind of ashamed, because you know a
person always feels bad when he is talking uncommon fine and thinks the
other person is admiring, and that other person goes to sleep that way.
Of course he oughtn't to go to sleep, because it's shabby; but the finer
a person talks the certainer it is to make you sleep, and so when you
come to look at it it ain't nobody's fault in particular; both of them's
to blame.

Jim begun to snore--soft and blubbery at first, then a long rasp, then
a stronger one, then a half a dozen horrible ones like the last water
sucking down the plug-hole of a bath-tub, then the same with more power
to it, and some big coughs and snorts flung in, the way a cow does that
is choking to death; and when the person has got to that point he is at
his level best, and can wake up a man that is in the next block with
a dipperful of loddanum in him, but can't wake himself up although all
that awful noise of his'n ain't but three inches from his own ears. And
that is the curiosest thing in the world, seems to me. But you rake a
match to light the candle, and that little bit of