in'
you went with your ma to visit 'em and when you got there you saw Mr.
Miller readin' to Mrs. Miller, and you saw the Miller girls playin', and
you saw Mitch Miller chewin' gum and readin' a book, and was so taken
with the book he wouldn't play with you, but finally said he'd read to
you, and so began to read from a book which he said was "Tom Sawyer,"
which was all about a boy just our age. And supposin' you got the book
after a while and you read it too, but you understood it only because
after a while Mitch explained it to you.

Well, this is the way it began: first the room, then the house--then the
town in a way--and then Mitch--but I got acquainted with him really and
he became my friend as I tell about after a while. Only now I just tell
how things began to clear up as I came out of sleep, as you might say.

And onct when I was up to Mr. Miller's and he was readin' from
Shakespeare to Mrs. Miller he came to a place where it says, "Our little
life is rounded by a sleep." I remember this because Mr. Miller stopped
and began to talk about it; and Mitch looked up from readin' "Tom
Sawyer," and I began to think about the sleep I came out of, and how
things at first seemed kind of double and like you had taken so-and-so's
cure for consumption which ma says has opium in it. For when I took it
for a cold, things kind of swum around me like a circular looking-glass,
that you could see through somehow, and everything seemed kind of way
off and funny and somethin' to laugh at and not treat as real.

Well, at first, too, everything seemed alive--even sticks and stones;
and the broomstick I made into a gun seemed to have a life or kind of a
memory of somethin'. And when I told Mr. Miller this he says, you're a
savage, or you've been one in some other life, or else maybe you're
repeatin' the life of a savage, and he called it filogenesis, or
somethin' like that.

But anyway, your town comes to you at last; at least the town as it is
then and seems to you then with all the folks in it, and your relatives,
and all their ways and all the stories about 'em. And you get your place
and find your friends, and you find one friend as I found Mitch. And so
you're awake, or as much awake, we'll say, as you are at first in the
morning when you first stretch out of bed. And so you get ready for the
day and the next sleep----

CHAPTER I

I got acquainted with Mitch this way: In the first place when we moved
to Petersburg a