d, without shame; when they were "house snakes" or
"garters" we carried them home and put them in Aunt Patsy's work-basket
for a surprise; for she was prejudiced against snakes, and always when
she took the basket in her lap and they began to climb out of it it
disordered her mind. She never could seem to get used to them; her
opportunities went for nothing. And she was always cold toward bats,
too, and could not bear them; and yet I think a bat is as friendly a
bird as there is. My mother was Aunt Patsy's sister, and had the same
wild superstitions. A bat is beautifully soft and silky: I do not know
any creature that is pleasanter to the touch, or is more grateful for
caressings, if offered in the right spirit. I know all about these
coleoptera, because our great cave, three miles below Hannibal, was
multitudinously stocked with them, and often I brought them home to
amuse my mother with. It was easy to manage if it was a school day,
because then I had ostensibly been to school and hadn't any bats. She
was not a suspicious person, but full of trust and confidence; and when
I said "There's something in my coat pocket for you," she would put her
hand in. But she always took it out again, herself; I didn't have to
tell her. It was remarkable, the way she couldn't learn to like private
bats.

I think she was never in the cave in her life; but everybody else went
there. Many excursion parties came from considerable distances up and
down the river to visit the cave. It was miles in extent, and was a
tangled wilderness of narrow and lofty clefts and passages. It was an
easy place to get lost in; anybody could do it--including the bats. I
got lost in it myself, along with a lady, and our last candle burned
down to almost nothing before we glimpsed the search-party's lights
winding about in the distance.

"Injun Joe" the half-breed got lost in there once, and would have
starved to death if the bats had run short. But there was no chance of
that; there were myriads of them. He told me all his story. In the book
called "Tom Sawyer" I starved him entirely to death in the cave, but
that was in the interest of art; it never happened. "General" Gaines,
who was our first town drunkard before Jimmy Finn got the place, was
lost in there for the space of a week, and finally pushed his
handkerchief out of a hole in a hilltop near Saverton, several miles
down the river from the cave's mouth, and somebody saw it and dug him
out. There is