the band of Uncle Silas's hat, which was on the bureau, because we
heard the children say their pa and ma was going to the runaway nigger's
house this morning, and then went to breakfast, and Tom dropped the
pewter spoon in Uncle Silas's coat-pocket, and Aunt Sally wasn't come
yet, so we had to wait a little while.

And when she come she was hot and red and cross, and couldn't hardly wait
for the blessing; and then she went to sluicing out coffee with one hand
and cracking the handiest child's head with her thimble with the other,
and says:

"I've hunted high and I've hunted low, and it does beat all what HAS
become of your other shirt."

My heart fell down amongst my lungs and livers and things, and a hard
piece of corn-crust started down my throat after it and got met on the
road with a cough, and was shot across the table, and took one of the
children in the eye and curled him up like a fishing-worm, and let a cry
out of him the size of a warwhoop, and Tom he turned kinder blue around
the gills, and it all amounted to a considerable state of things for
about a quarter of a minute or as much as that, and I would a sold out
for half price if there was a bidder. But after that we was all right
again--it was the sudden surprise of it that knocked us so kind of cold.
Uncle Silas he says:

"It's most uncommon curious, I can't understand it. I know perfectly
well I took it OFF, because--"

"Because you hain't got but one ON. Just LISTEN at the man! I know you
took it off, and know it by a better way than your wool-gethering memory,
too, because it was on the clo's-line yesterday--I see it there myself.
But it's gone, that's the long and the short of it, and you'll just have
to change to a red flann'l one till I can get time to make a new one.
And it 'll be the third I've made in two years. It just keeps a body on
the jump to keep you in shirts; and whatever you do manage to DO with 'm
all is more'n I can make out. A body 'd think you WOULD learn to take
some sort of care of 'em at your time of life."

"I know it, Sally, and I do try all I can. But it oughtn't to be
altogether my fault, because, you know, I don't see them nor have nothing
to do with them except when they're on me; and I don't believe I've ever
lost one of them OFF of me."

"Well, it ain't YOUR fault if you haven't, Silas; you'd a done it if you
could, I reckon. And the shirt ain't all that's gone, nuther. Ther's a
spoon gone; and THAT ain't