s'pose the rats took the SHEET? WHERE'S it gone,
Lize?"

"Clah to goodness I hain't no notion, Miss' Sally. She wuz on de
clo'sline yistiddy, but she done gone: she ain' dah no mo' now."

"I reckon the world IS coming to an end. I NEVER see the beat of it in
all my born days. A shirt, and a sheet, and a spoon, and six can--"

"Missus," comes a young yaller wench, "dey's a brass cannelstick miss'n."

"Cler out from here, you hussy, er I'll take a skillet to ye!"

Well, she was just a-biling. I begun to lay for a chance; I reckoned I
would sneak out and go for the woods till the weather moderated. She
kept a-raging right along, running her insurrection all by herself, and
everybody else mighty meek and quiet; and at last Uncle Silas, looking
kind of foolish, fishes up that spoon out of his pocket. She stopped,
with her mouth open and her hands up; and as for me, I wished I was in
Jeruslem or somewheres. But not long, because she says:

"It's JUST as I expected. So you had it in your pocket all the time; and
like as not you've got the other things there, too. How'd it get there?"

"I reely don't know, Sally," he says, kind of apologizing, "or you know I
would tell. I was a-studying over my text in Acts Seventeen before
breakfast, and I reckon I put it in there, not noticing, meaning to put
my Testament in, and it must be so, because my Testament ain't in; but
I'll go and see; and if the Testament is where I had it, I'll know I
didn't put it in, and that will show that I laid the Testament down and
took up the spoon, and--"

"Oh, for the land's sake! Give a body a rest! Go 'long now, the whole
kit and biling of ye; and don't come nigh me again till I've got back my
peace of mind."

I'd a heard her if she'd a said it to herself, let alone speaking it out;
and I'd a got up and obeyed her if I'd a been dead. As we was passing
through the setting-room the old man he took up his hat, and the
shingle-nail fell out on the floor, and he just merely picked it up and
laid it on the mantel-shelf, and never said nothing, and went out. Tom
see him do it, and remembered about the spoon, and says:

"Well, it ain't no use to send things by HIM no more, he ain't reliable."
Then he says: "But he done us a good turn with the spoon, anyway,
without knowing it, and so we'll go and do him one without HIM knowing
it--stop up his rat-holes."

There was a noble good lot of them down cellar, and it took us a whole
hour, b