adn't really ought
to over every second helping but taking it. Do you get me? You do!

Since she had heard Jim was coming back, however, she had taken to
eating everything in sight regardless. It give me real pleasure to think
of any mother-in-law feeling that way about her daughter's husband and
dancing partner coming back, for with many mothers it is nothing of the
kind. So I made no remarks upon the cruller, and finally Ma give a gulp
and gasped out the bad news.

"Maude is gone!" she says.

"Gone?" says I. "Whatter you mean, gone?"

"I can't find her no place!" says Ma. "And I looked everywheres!"

This give me a most unpleasant feeling down my back, and I got to my
feet in a hurry.

"Are you sure she ain't hid?" I says, "like the last time," I says.

"Come and see for yourself!" says Ma, and I went, you can bet on that!
And sure enough, she wasn't in the box. Ma lifted the wire off the top
and lifted out the two old sofa cushions we had put in for comfort and
only Maude's husband, 'Frisco, was there. He was as usual lying in about
five coils like a boiler-heater, with his wicked-looking flat head on
the top, and he stuck out his oyster fork of a tongue, and give us a
little hiss, much as to say, why was we always disturbing him. But no
Maude.

"Ma!" I began, catching a guilty look on her face. "Ma Gilligan, you
left that snake out again! After all the times I ast you not to!"

"Well, it was just for a minute!" she says. "I was playing with her, and
then I thought maybe the crullers I had made was cool by then and I went
and got a few and when I come back she was gone!"

"Well, she's got to be found, that's all!" I snapped. "All this comes
from you insisting on keeping in with them low circus people and
boarding their acts for them!"

"But Madame Estelle had to stay with her husband when he fell offen the
trapeze and they so devoted!" says Ma. "And I didn't take the big
snakes--the substitute is using them--but only her own dear pets which
the landlady wouldn't leave her have in her room."

"And now one of them is loose in _my_ room!" I says, "which is the
general result of charity which, as the poet says, had ought to begin at
home," I says. "And you know, Ma, how I feel about snakes. There's
nobody in the psycopathic ward got anything on me. If only they had even
a few feet instead of so many yards, I wouldn't mind them so much."

"Well, now Mary, I'm real sorry," says Ma. "But not half so sorry a