here, do you
reckon?"

"I doan' know but maybe I could, Mars Tom; but it's tolable dark in
heah, en I ain' got no use f'r no flower, nohow, en she'd be a pow'ful
sight o' trouble."

"Well, you try it, anyway. Some other prisoners has done it."

"One er dem big cat-tail-lookin' mullen-stalks would grow in heah,
Mars Tom, I reck'n, but she wouldn't be wuth half de trouble she'd
coss."

"Don't you believe it. We'll fetch you a little one and you plant it
in the corner over there, and raise it. And don't call it mullen, call
it Pitchiola--that's its right name when it's in a prison. And you
want to water it with your tears."

"Why, I got plenty spring water, Mars Tom."

"You don't _want_ spring water; you want to water it with your tears.
It's the way they always do."

"Why, Mars Tom, I lay I kin raise one er dem mullen-stalks twyste wid
spring water whiles another man's a start'n one wid tears."

"That ain't the idea. You _got_ to do it with tears."

"She'll die on my han's, Mars Tom, she sholy will; kase I doan'
skasely ever cry."

So Tom was stumped. But he studied it over, and then said Jim would
have to worry along the best he could with an onion. He promised he
would go to the nigger cabins and drop one, private, in Jim's
coffee-pot, in the morning. Jim said he would "jis' 's soon have
tobacker in his coffee"; and found so much fault with it, and with the
work and bother of raising the mullen, and jew's-harping the rats, and
petting and flattering up the snakes and spiders and things, on top of
all the other work he had to do on pens, and inscriptions, and
journals, and things, which made it more trouble and worry and
responsibility to be a prisoner than anything he ever undertook, that
Tom most lost all patience with him; and said he was just loadened
down with more gaudier chances than a prisoner ever had in the world
to make a name for himself, and yet he didn't know enough to
appreciate them, and they was just about wasted on him. So Jim he was
sorry, and said he wouldn't behave so no more, and then me and Tom
shoved for bed.

CHAPTER XXXIX

In the morning we went up to the village and bought a wire rat-trap
and fetched it down, and unstopped the best rat-hole, and in about an
hour we had fifteen of the bulliest kind of ones; and then we took it
and put it in a safe place under Aunt Sally's bed. But while we was
gone for spiders little Thomas Franklin Benjamin Jefferson Elexander
Phelps