enough to make a body cry, it was so beautiful.
Jim DID cry, and rip and dance and carry on, he was
so thankful and out of his mind for joy. It was my
watch, so I had to stay by the works, but Tom and
Jim clumb down and drunk a barrel apiece, and
fetched me up a lot, and I’ve tasted a many a good
thing in my life, but nothing that ever begun with that
water.
Then we went down and had a swim, and then Tom
came up and spelled me, and me and Jim had a swim,
and then Jim spelled Tom, and me and Tom had a
foot-race and a boxing-mill, and I don’t reckon I ever
had such a good time in my life. It warn’t so very
hot, because it was close on to evening, and we hadn’t
any clothes on, anyway. Clothes is well enough in
school, and in towns, and at balls, too, but there ain’t
no sense in them when there ain’t no civilization nor
other kinds of bothers and fussiness around.
“Lions a-comin’! — lions! Quick, Mars Tom!
Jump for yo’ life, Huck!”
Oh, and didn’t we! We never stopped for clothes,
but waltzed up the ladder just so. Jim lost his head
straight off — he always done it whenever he got ex-
cited and scared; and so now, ‘stead of just easing the
ladder up from the ground a little, so the animals
couldn’t reach it, he turned on a raft of power, and we
went whizzing up and was dangling in the sky before
he got his wits together and seen what a foolish thing
he was doing. Then he stopped her, but he had clean
forgot what to do next; so there we was, so high that
the lions looked like pups, and we was drifting off on
the wind.
But Tom he shinned up and went for the works and
begun to slant her down, and back toward the lake,
where the animals was gathering like a camp-meeting,
and I judged he had lost HIS head, too; for he knowed
I was too scared to climb, and did he want to dump
me among the tigers and things?
But no, his head was level, he knowed what he was
about. He swooped down to within thirty or forty
feet of the lake, and stopped right over the center, and
sung out:
“Leggo, and drop!”
I done it, and shot down, feet first, and seemed to
go about a mile toward the bottom; and when I come
up, he says:
“Now lay on your back and float till you’re rested
and got your pluck back, then I’ll dip the ladder in
the water and you can climb aboard.”
I done it. Now that was ever so smart in Tom, be-
cause if he had started off somewheres else to drop
down on the sand, the menagerie would ‘a’ come
along, too, and might ‘a’ kept us hunting a safe place
till I got tuckered out and fell.
And all this time the lions and tigers was sorting out
the clothes, and trying to divide them up so there
would be some for all, but there was a misunderstand-
ing about it somewheres, on account of some of them
trying to hog more than their share; so there was
another insurrection, and you never see anything like
it in the world. There must ‘a’ been fifty of them, all
mixed up together, snorting and roaring and snapping
and biting and tearing, legs and tails in the air, and
you couldn’t tell which was which, and the sand and
fur a-flying. And when they got done, some was
dead. and some was limping off crippled, and the rest
was setting around on the battlefield, some of them
licking their sore places and the others looking up at
us and seemed to be kind of inviting us to come down
and have some fun, but which we didn’t want any.
As for the clothes, they warn’t any, any more.
Every last rag of them was inside of the animals; and
not agreeing with them very well, I don’t reckon, for