"Because you hain't got but one _on_.  Just _listen_ at the man!  I know you took it off, and know it by a better way than your wool-gethering memory, too, because it was on the clo's-line yesterday—I see it there myself. But it's gone, that's the long and the short of it, and you'll just have to change to a red flann'l one till I can get time to make a new one. And it 'll be the third I've made in two years.  It just keeps a body on the jump to keep you in shirts; and whatever you do manage to _do_ with 'm all is more'n I can make out.  A body 'd think you _would_ learn to take some sort of care of 'em at your time of life."

"I know it, Sally, and I do try all I can.  But it oughtn't to be altogether my fault, because, you know, I don't see them nor have nothing to do with them except when they're on me; and I don't believe I've ever lost one of them _off_ of me."

"Well, it ain't _your_ fault if you haven't, Silas; you'd a done it if you could, I reckon.  And the shirt ain't all that's gone, nuther.  Ther's a spoon gone; and _that_ ain't all.  There was ten, and now ther's only nine. The calf got the shirt, I reckon, but the calf never took the spoon, _that's_ certain."

"Why, what else is gone, Sally?"

"Ther's six _candles_ gone—that's what.  The rats could a got the candles, and I reckon they did; I wonder they don't walk off with the whole place, the way you're always going to stop their holes and don't do it; and if they warn't fools they'd sleep in your hair, Silas—_you'd_ never find it out; but you can't lay the _spoon_ on the rats, and that I know."

"Well, Sally, I'm in fault, and I acknowledge it; I've been remiss; but I won't let to-morrow go by without stopping up them holes."

"Oh, I wouldn't hurry; next year 'll do.  Matilda Angelina Araminta _Phelps!_"

Whack comes the thimble, and the child snatches her claws out of the sugar-bowl without fooling around any.  Just then the n***** woman steps on to the passage, and says:

"Missus, dey's a sheet gone."

"A _sheet_ gone!  Well, for the land's sake!"

"I'll stop up them holes to-day," says Uncle Silas, looking sorrowful.

"Oh, _do_ shet up!—s'pose the rats took the _sheet_?  _where's_ it gone, Lize?"

"Clah to goodness I hain't no notion, Miss' Sally.  She wuz on de clo'sline yistiddy, but she done gone:  she ain' dah no mo' now."

"I reckon the world _is_ coming to an end.  I _never_ see the beat of it in all my born days.  A shirt, and a sheet, and a spoon, and six can—"

"Missus," comes a young yaller wench, "dey's a brass cannelstick miss'n."

"Cler out from here, you hussy, er I'll take a skillet to ye!"

Well, she was just a-biling.  I begun to lay for a chance; I reckoned I would sneak out and go for the woods till the weather moderated.  She kept a-raging right along, running her insurrection all by herself, and everybody else mighty meek and quiet; and at last Uncle Silas, looking kind of foolish, fishes up that spoon out of his pocket.  She stopped, with her mouth open and her hands up; and as for me, I wished I was in Jeruslem or somewheres. But not long, because she says: