man so that he said he
could most wish there hadn't ever been no snakes created. Why, after
every last snake had been gone clear out of the house for as much as a
week Aunt Sally warn't over it yet; she warn't near over it; when she
was setting thinking about something you could touch her on the back
of her neck with a feather and she would jump right out of her
stockings. It was very curious. But Tom said all women was just so. He
said they was made that way for some reason or other.

We got a licking every time one of our snakes come in her way, and she
allowed these lickings warn't nothing to what she would do if we ever
loaded up the place again with them. I didn't mind the lickings,
because they didn't amount to nothing; but I minded the trouble we had
to lay in another lot. But we got them laid in, and all the other
things; and you never see a cabin as blithesome as Jim's was when
they'd all swarm out for music and go for him. Jim didn't like the
spiders, and the spiders didn't like Jim; and so they'd lay for him,
and make it mighty warm for him. And he said that between the rats and
the snakes and the grindstone there warn't no room in bed for him,
skasely; and when there was, a body couldn't sleep, it was so lively,
and it was always lively, he said, because _they_ never all slept at
one time, but took turn about, so when the snakes was asleep the rats
was on deck, and when the rats turned in the snakes come on watch, so
he always had one gang under him, in his way, and t'other gang having
a circus over him, and if he got up to hunt a new place the spiders
would take a chance at him as he crossed over. He said if he ever got
out this time he wouldn't ever be a prisoner again, not for a salary.

Well, by the end of three weeks everything was in pretty good shape.
The shirt was sent in early, in a pie, and every time a rat bit Jim he
would get up and write a line in his journal whilst the ink was fresh;
the pens was made, the inscriptions and so on was all carved on the
grindstone; the bed-leg was sawed in two, and we had et up the
sawdust, and it give us a most amazing stomach-ache. We reckoned we
was all going to die, but didn't. It was the most undigestible sawdust
I ever see; and Tom said the same. But as I was saying, we'd got all
the work done now, at last; and we was all pretty much fagged out,
too, but mainly Jim. The old man had wrote a couple of times to the
plantation below Orleans to come and get the