Mark Tidd in the Backwoods

at the chances are for my coming out alive. You can go if the other boys can, she told me, and I didnt wait to hear another word, but went pelting off to Marks house. Mark was in the back yard talking to his father when I got there, and I burst right in on them. Can you go I hollered. Dyou think you can go L-l-light somewheres, says he. Youre floppin around l-l-l-like Bill Durfees one legged ch-chicken. Can you go to my uncle Hieronymouss Were asked in a letter. The whole kit a d bilin of us. Up in the woods. Right on a trout-stream. In a log cabin. I broke it all up into short sentences like that, I was so anxious. After a while Mark got it all out of me so he understood it, then he turned to his father. C-c-can I go, father he asked. Mr. Tidd, though hed got to be rich, was just as mild and sort of dazed-like and forgetful as ever-and helpless You wouldnt believe how helpless he was. Way off into the woods says he. Fishin and sich like Urn-hum. S fars Im concerned, Mark, there haint a single objection, but, Mark, I calclate you better see your ma. She sort of looks after the family moren I do. . . . And if she lets you go, son, Ill give you a new set of Gibbons Decline and Fall to take with you. Youll enjoy readin it evenins. With that he took out of his pocket a volume of old Gibbon and sat himself down on the back steps to read it. He was always reading that book and telling you things out of it. After Id known him a year I most knew it by heart. We went right up-stairs to where Mrs. Tidd was making her husband a shirt on the sewing machine. She didnt h e to make him shirts, because they had money enough from the invention to buy h a dozen to a time if they wanted to. But Mrs. Tidd, she says there aint any use buying shirts for a dollar and a half when you can make them twice as good for fifty cents and a little work. That was her all over. Mark called to her from the door...