was a simple speech, and made up of small words, but it went home,
and Sandy's noise was not a trouble to me any more. She never used large
words, but she had a natural gift for making small ones do effective
work. She lived to reach the neighborhood of ninety years, and was
capable with her tongue to the last--especially when a meanness or an
injustice roused her spirit. She has come handy to me several times in
my books, where she figures as Tom Sawyer's "Aunt Polly." I fitted her
out with a dialect, and tried to think up other improvements for her,
but did not find any. I used Sandy once, also; it was in "Tom Sawyer"; I
tried to get him to whitewash the fence, but it did not work. I do not
remember what name I called him by in the book.

I can see the farm yet, with perfect clearness. I can see all its
belongings, all its details; the family room of the house, with a
"trundle" bed in one corner and a spinning-wheel in another--a wheel
whose rising and falling wail, heard from a distance, was the
mournfulest of all sounds to me, and made me homesick and low-spirited,
and filled my atmosphere with the wandering spirits of the dead: the
vast fireplace, piled high, on winter nights, with flaming hickory logs
from whose ends a sugary sap bubbled out but did not go to waste, for we
scraped it off and ate it; the lazy cat spread out on the rough
hearthstones, the drowsy dogs braced against the jambs and blinking; my
aunt in one chimney-corner knitting, my uncle in the other smoking his
corn-cob pipe; the slick and carpetless oak floor faintly mirroring the
dancing flame-tongues and freckled with black indentations where
fire-coals had popped out and died a leisurely death; half a dozen
children romping in the background twilight; "split"-bottomed chairs
here and there, some with rockers; a cradle--out of service, but
waiting, with confidence; in the early cold mornings a snuggle of
children, in shirts and chemises, occupying the hearthstone and
procrastinating--they could not bear to leave that comfortable place and
go out on the wind-swept floor-space between the house and kitchen where
the general tin basin stood, and wash.

Along outside of the front fence ran the country road; dusty in the
summer-time, and a good place for snakes--they liked to lie in it and
sun themselves; when they were rattlesnakes or puff adders, we killed
them: when they were black snakes, or racers, or belonged to the fabled
"hoop" breed, we fle