we would be so far toward England that we might as
well go there, and come back in a ship, and have the
glory of saying we done it.
About midnight the storm quit and the moon come
out and lit up the ocean, and we begun to feel com-
fortable and drowsy; so we stretched out on the
lockers and went to sleep, and never woke up again
till sun-up. The sea was sparkling like di’monds, and
it was nice weather, and pretty soon our things was all
dry again.
We went aft to find some breakfast, and the first
thing we noticed was that there was a dim light burning
in a compass back there under a hood. Then Tom was
disturbed. He says:
“You know what that means, easy enough. It
means that somebody has got to stay on watch and
steer this thing the same as he would a ship, or she’ll
wander around and go wherever the wind wants her
to.”
“Well,” I says, “what’s she been doing since —
er — since we had the accident?”
“Wandering,” he says, kinder troubled –” wander-
ing, without any doubt. She’s in a wind now that’s
blowing her south of east. We don’t know how long
that’s been going on, either.”
So then he p’inted her east, and said he would hold
her there till we rousted out the breakfast. The pro-
fessor had laid in everything a body could want; he
couldn’t ‘a’ been better fixed. There wasn’t no milk
for the coffee, but there was water, and everything
else you could want, and a charcoal stove and the
fixings for it, and pipes and cigars and matches; and
wine and liquor, which warn’t in our line; and books,
and maps, and charts, and an accordion; and furs,
and blankets, and no end of rubbish, like brass beads
and brass jewelry, which Tom said was a sure sign that
he had an idea of visiting among savages. There was
money, too. Yes, the professor was well enough fixed.
After breakfast Tom learned me and Jim how to
steer, and divided us all up into four-hour watches,
turn and turn about; and when his watch was out I
took his place, and he got out the professor’s papers
and pens and wrote a letter home to his aunt Polly, tell-
ing her everything that had happened to us, and dated
it “IN THE WELKIN, APPROACHING ENGLAND,” and folded
it together and stuck it fast with a red wafer, and
directed it, and wrote above the direction, in big
writing, “FROM TOM SAWYER, THE ERRONORT,” and said
it would stump old Nat Parsons, the postmaster, when
it come along in the mail. I says:
“Tom Sawyer, this ain’t no welkin, it’s a balloon.”
“Well, now, who SAID it was a welkin, smarty?”
“You’ve wrote it on the letter, anyway.”
“What of it? That don’t mean that the balloon’s
the welkin.”
“Oh, I thought it did. Well, then, what is a
welkin?”
I see in a minute he was stuck. He raked and
scraped around in his mind, but he couldn’t find noth-
ing, so he had to say:
“I don’t know, and nobody don’t know. It’s just
a word, and it’s a mighty good word, too. There
ain’t many that lays over it. I don’t believe there’s
ANY that does.”
“Shucks!” I says. “But what does it MEAN? —
that’s the p’int. ”
“I don’t know what it means, I tell you. It’s a
word that people uses for — for — well, it’s orna-
mental. They don’t put ruffles on a shirt to keep a
person warm, do they?”
“Course they don’t.”
“But they put them ON, don’t they?”
“Yes.”
“All right, then; that letter I wrote is a shirt, and
the welkin’s the ruffle on it.”
I judged that that would gravel Jim, and it did.
“Now, Mars Tom, it ain’t no use to talk like dat;
en, moreover, it’s sinful. You knows a letter ain’t no
shirt, en dey ain’t no ruffles on it, nuther. Dey ain’t
no place to put ’em on; you can’t put em on, and
dey wouldn’t stay ef you did.”
“Oh DO shut up, and wait till something’s started