minute Tom begun to talk about birds I judged he
was a goner, because Jim knowed more about birds than both of us put
together. You see, he had killed hundreds and hundreds of them, and
that's the way to find out about birds. That's the way people does that
writes books about birds, and loves them so that they'll go hungry and
tired and take any amount of trouble to find a new bird and kill it.
Their name is ornithologers, and I could have been an ornithologer
myself, because I always loved birds and creatures; and I started out to
learn how to be one, and I see a bird setting on a limb of a high tree,
singing with its head tilted back and its mouth open, and before I
thought I fired, and his song stopped and he fell straight down from the
limb, all limp like a rag, and I run and picked him up and he was dead,
and his body was warm in my hand, and his head rolled about this way and
that, like his neck was broke, and there was a little white skin over his
eyes, and one little drop of blood on the side of his head; and, laws! I
couldn't see nothing more for the tears; and I hain't never murdered no
creature since that warn't doing me no harm, and I ain't going to.

But I was aggravated about that welkin. I wanted to know. I got the
subject up again, and then Tom explained, the best he could. He said when
a person made a big speech the newspapers said the shouts of the people
made the welkin ring. He said they always said that, but none of them
ever told what it was, so he allowed it just meant outdoors and up high.
Well, that seemed sensible enough, so I was satisfied, and said so. That
pleased Tom and put him in a good humor again, and he says:

"Well, it's all right, then; and we'll let bygones be bygones. I don't
know for certain what a welkin is, but when we land in London we'll make
it ring, anyway, and don't you forget it."

He said an erronort was a person who sailed around in balloons; and said
it was a mighty sight finer to be Tom Sawyer the Erronort than to be Tom
Sawyer the Traveler, and we would be heard of all round the world, if we
pulled through all right, and so he wouldn't give shucks to be a traveler
now.

Toward the middle of the afternoon we got everything ready to land, and
we felt pretty good, too, and proud; and we kept watching with the
glasses, like Columbus discovering America. But we couldn't see nothing
but ocean. The afternoon wasted out and the sun shut down, and still
there warn't no land