Sunday night, and I rasseled with a tin basin of skim milk, and some old back number bread, and wanted to go to bed, but the deacon wanted to know if I was heathen enough to want to go to bed without evening prayers. There was no one thing I was less mashed on than evening prayers about that minute, but I had to take a prayer half an hour long on the top of that skim milk, and I guess it curdled the milk, for I hadn't been in bed more than half an hour before I had the worst colic a boy ever had, and I thought I should die all alone up in that garret, on the floor, with nothing to make my last hours pleasant but some rats playing with ears of seed corn on the floor, and mice running through some dry pea pods. But how different the deacon talked in the evening devotions from what he did when the cow was galloping on him in the barnyard. Well, I got through the colic and was just getting to sleep when the deacon yelled for me to get up and hustle down stairs. I thought may be the house was on fire, 'cause I smelled smoke, and I got into my trousers and came down stairs on a jump yelling 'fire,' when the deacon grabbed me and told me to get down on my knees, and before I knew it he was into the morning devotions, and when he said 'amen' and jumped and said for us to fire breakfast into us quick and get to work doing chores. I looked at the clock and it was just three o'clock in the morning, just the time Pa comes home and goes to bed in town, when he is running a political campaign. Well, sir, I had to jump from one thing to another from three o'clock in the morning till nine at night, pitching hay, driving reaper, raking and binding, shocking wheat, hoeing corn, and everything, and I never got a kind word. I spoiled my clothes, and I think another week would make a pirate of me. But during it all I had the advantage of a pious example. I tell you, you think more of such a man as the deacon if you don't work for him, but only see him when he comes to town, and you hear him sing 'Heaven is my Home,' through his nose. He even is farther from home than any place I ever heard of. He would be a good mate on a Mississippi river steamboat if he could swear, and I guess he could soon learn. Now you take these cabbages and give me ninety cents, and I will go home and borrow ten cents to make up the dollar, and send my chum back with the horse and wagon and my resignation. I was not cut out for a farmer. Talk about fishing, the only fish I saw was a salt white fish we had for breakfast one morning, which was salted by Noah, in the ark,” and while the grocery man was unloading the cabbages the boy went off to look for his chum, and later the two boys were seen driving off to the farm with two fishing poles sticking out of the hind end of the wagon. CHAPTER XXVII.