d, the same as a woman. And that ain't
all," says pa; "men are performers and women is the audience; and women
just sit and look and criticize, or maybe applaud if they like the
performer; and men have to act their best, write the best books, and
make the best speeches, and get the most money so as to please women
which is the audience--and a woman can't do nothin' but applaud or
criticize, and stir up the men to do their best--just because men,
until they know better, want to please the women so as to get them for
wives or somethin'."

And so pa went on till ma said: "I've heard enough of this--" and she
went into the next room and slept with Little Billie.

And pa called out and said, "You ain't mad, are you?" And ma called
back, "Just keep to your own self and shut up."

But as I can't come back to this again, I'll say that Mr. Bennett did
fail and lose everything; and in about a year Nellie came back, her
husband havin' left her after her pa failed; and she began to clerk in
one of the stores, and is yet.

CHAPTER III

After I met Mitch and after we saw the fight and the wedding, we went
out to Montgomery's woods a few times in the afternoon when school was
over. But we couldn't do much, because first we read "Tom Sawyer" along
settin' on stumps and logs. We had to get the idea into our heads
better; at least I did, because now we was about to carry out what Tom
had done and wrote about--or what Mark Twain had wrote about for him. So
we'd no sooner dig a few spadefuls than it would be gettin' dark, and
we'd have to go home.

[Illustration: Sitting on Logs]

One evening it began to rain and then thunder and lightnin', and we
stood in a kind of shed for a bit, when all of a sudden I felt creepy
and tingly, and saw a flash, followed by awful thunder; and of course I
knew I had got a shock. Perry Strickland had been killed the summer
before just this a way; and it seemed like once in a while God just
launched out like you'd swat a fly, and took somebody; and of course
you couldn't tell who He was goin' to come after next. Things like this,
besides lots of other things, my grandpa's prayers and other things, had
made me think a lot of religion, so as to be ready if I was to be took
by lightnin' or drownin' or anything suddent. And some of the boys said
that if you was drowned and didn't have nothin' on, you'd be kept out of
heaven, and sent to a place of punishment. So it began to look like they
was a lo