"It's _just_ as I expected.  So you had it in your pocket all the time; and like as not you've got the other things there, too.  How'd it get there?"

"I reely don't know, Sally," he says, kind of apologizing, "or you know I would tell.  I was a-studying over my text in Acts Seventeen before breakfast, and I reckon I put it in there, not noticing, meaning to put my Testament in, and it must be so, because my Testament ain't in; but I'll go and see; and if the Testament is where I had it, I'll know I didn't put it in, and that will show that I laid the Testament down and took up the spoon, and—"

"Oh, for the land's sake!  Give a body a rest!  Go 'long now, the whole kit and biling of ye; and don't come nigh me again till I've got back my peace of mind."

I'D a heard her if she'd a said it to herself, let alone speaking it out; and I'd a got up and obeyed her if I'd a been dead.  As we was passing through the setting-room the old man he took up his hat, and the shingle-nail fell out on the floor, and he just merely picked it up and laid it on the mantel-shelf, and never said nothing, and went out.  Tom see him do it, and remembered about the spoon, and says:

"Well, it ain't no use to send things by _him_ no more, he ain't reliable." Then he says:  "But he done us a good turn with the spoon, anyway, without knowing it, and so we'll go and do him one without _him_ knowing it—stop up his rat-holes."

There was a noble good lot of them down cellar, and it took us a whole hour, but we done the job tight and good and shipshape.  Then we heard steps on the stairs, and blowed out our light and hid; and here comes the old man, with a candle in one hand and a bundle of stuff in t'other, looking as absent-minded as year before last.  He went a mooning around, first to one rat-hole and then another, till he'd been to them all.  Then he stood about five minutes, picking tallow-drip off of his candle and thinking.  Then he turns off slow and dreamy towards the stairs, saying:

"Well, for the life of me I can't remember when I done it.  I could show her now that I warn't to blame on account of the rats.  But never mind—let it go.  I reckon it wouldn't do no good."

And so he went on a-mumbling up stairs, and then we left.  He was a mighty nice old man.  And always is.