Then I come back and set down again, and says:

     "Don't you holler. Just set still and take it like a man. I got to tell the truth, and you want to brace up, Miss Mary, because it's a bad kind, and going to be hard to take, but there ain't no help for it. These uncles of yourn ain't no uncles at all; they're a couple of frauds --regular dead-beats. There, now we're over the worst of it, you can stand the rest middling easy."

     It jolted her up like everything, of course; but I was over the shoal water now, so I went right along, her eyes a-blazing higher and higher all the time, and told her every blame thing, from where we first struck that young fool going up to the steamboat, clear through to where she flung herself on to the king's breast at the front door and he kissed her sixteen or seventeen times--and then up she jumps, with her face afire like sunset, and says:

     "The brute! Come, don't waste a minute--not a SECOND--we'll have them tarred and feathered, and flung in the river!"

     Says I:

     "Cert'nly. But do you mean BEFORE you go to Mr. Lothrop's, or--"

     "Oh," she says, "what am I THINKING about!" she says, and set right down again. "Don't mind what I said--please don't--you WON'T, now, WILL you?" Laying her silky hand on mine in that kind of a way that I said I would die first. "I never thought, I was so stirred up," she says; "now go on, and I won't do so any more. You tell me what to do, and whatever you say I'll do it."