Pink. I didn't like to
have Mitch friends with these boys. It hurt me; and I was afraid of
something, and they were not very friendly to me for some reason. But a
few times I went to Charley King's to stay all night. His mother was a
strange woman. She petted Charley like the mother did in the "Fourth
Reader" whose boy was hanged because he had no raisin' and was given his
own way about everything. Mrs. King used to look at me and say I had
pretty eyes and take me on her lap and stroke my head. She was a queer
woman, and Charley's father was off somewhere, Chandlerville, or
somewhere, and they said they didn't live together. My ma stopped me
goin' to Mrs. King's, and so as Charley ran with George Heigold, that's
probably why I didn't like Mitch to be with them, as I wasn't very
friendly any more with Charley on account of this.

These two boys went off somewhere and left us when we got to the square.
And then I took Mitch to see something.

The tables was now turned. I did most of the talkin'--though Mitch was
more interestin' than me, and that's why he says more than I do in this
book. We went to that corner where we was the day before, and I says to
Mitch: "Look at this house partly in the street, and look at the street
how it jogs. Well, Linkern did that. You see he surveyed this whole town
of Petersburg. But as to this, this is how it happened. You see it was
after the Black Hawk War in 1836, and when Linkern came here to survey,
he found that Jemima Elmore, which was a widow of Linkern's friend in
the war, had a piece of land, and had built a house on it and was livin'
here with her children. And Linkern saw if the street run straight north
and south, a part of her house would be in the street. So to save
Jemima's house, he set his compass to make the line run a little furder
south. And so this is how the line got skewed and leaves this strip kind
of irregular, clear through the town, north and south. This is what I
call makin' a mistake that is all right, bein' good and bad at the same
time."

And Mitch says: "A man that will do that is my kind. And yet pa used to
say that freein' the slaves was not the thing; and maybe Linkern skewed
the line there and left a strip clear across the country that will
always be irregular and bad."

"Anyway," said Mitch, "do you know what I think? I think there ain't two
boys in the world that live in as good a town as this. What's Tom
Sawyer's town? Nothin' without Tom Sawyer-