“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 jews-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.
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 found it there,
and opened the door of it to see if the rats would
come out, and they did; and Aunt Sally she come in,
and when we got back she was a-standing on top of
the bed raising Cain, and the rats was doing what
they could to keep off the dull times for her.
So she took and dusted us both with the hickry, and
we was as much as two hours catching another fifteen
or sixteen, drat that meddlesome cub, and they warn’t
the likeliest, nuther, because the first haul was
the pick of the flock. I never see a likelier
lot of rats than what that first haul was.
