early mornin', that I mistook that
rattlesnake for a chunk of wood and heaved him in the stove."

"Well, where's the bad luck in that?" asked Charley.

"Inquire of the snake," said Mr. Scraggs; "besides, he smelt awful.
I don't seem to be able to bring back any mornin' I cared less for
breakfast than that one. Suppose you was a happy rattlesnake,
Charley, with a large and promisin' fambly; suppose, now, on a
frosty thirteenth of October you crawled under the cook-stove to
get warm the minute the camp cook opened the door, and, before you
limbered up enough to bite him, cooky lays cold and unfeelin' hands
upon you and Jams you into the stove--ain't the number thirteen
goin' to carry unpleasant recollections for you from that on? Bet
your life. Howsomever, these are only small details. My main
proof that the number thirteen ain't any better than it orter be
lies in the fact that one day I married the thirteenth in Mrs.
Scraggs. If I'd never'd hearn of such a thing I'd know'd thirteen
was no good from that time on. This ain't to cast reflections on
the other Mrs. Scraggses, neither. I will say for them wimmen that
anything simple-heartedness could do to prepare a man to meet his
end cheerful they done. But Mehitabel the Thirteenth, of the
reignin' family of Scraggs, was a genius. Uncle Peter Paisley uset
to say that a genius was a person that could take a cork and a
dryness of the throat, and with them simple ingrejents construct a
case of jim-jams. More than one-quarter of the time Uncle Pete
knew what he was talkin' about, too, and the rest of it he was too
happy to care. Mehitabel was a sure-enough genius: she could make
a domestic difficulty out of a shoestring, she could draw a fambly
jar through a hole in a sock, and she could bring on civil war over
the question of whether there was anything to quar'l about,

"Come Christmastime, I thought I'd leave home for a spell. There
was an old friend of mine holdin' down a mine out in the hills. I
knew he wouldn't have no company around, and I pined for solitude.
There is a time in the affairs of men, as Shakespeare says, when a
pair of cold feet beats any hands in the deck. Keno Jim said
Shakespeare said so, and Shakespeare's too dead to argue.

"'So I puts on a pair of them long, slidin' snowshoes they call
'skees' and slips for William Pemberton and the lonesome mountains.
People don't call a thing 'skee' unless they hev good reason for
it. Before I cau