«Well,» says I, «I think they are a pack of flat-heads for not keeping the palace themselves 'stead of fooling them away like that. And what's more-if I was one of them I would see a man in Jericho before I would drop my business and come to him for the rubbing of an old tin lamp.»

«How you talk, Huck Finn. Why, you'd HAVE to come when he rubbed it, whether you wanted to or not.»

«What! and I as high as a tree and as big as a church? All right, then; I WOULD come; but I lay I'd make that man climb the highest tree there was in the country.»

«Shucks, it ain't no use to talk to you, Huck Finn. You don't seem to know anything, somehow-perfect saphead.»

I thought all this over for two or three days, and then I reckoned I would see if there was anything in it. I got an old tin lamp and an iron ring, and went out in the woods and rubbed and rubbed till I sweat like an Injun, calculating to build a palace and sell it; but it warn't no use, none of the genies come. So then I judged that all that stuff was only just one of Tom Sawyer's lies. I reckoned he believed in the A-rabs and the elephants, but as for me I think different. It had all the marks of a Sunday-school.

CHAPTER IV.

WELL, three or four months run along, and it was well into the winter now. I had been to school most all the time and could spell and read and write just a little, and could say the multiplication table up to six times seven is thirty-five, and I don't reckon I could ever get any further than that if I was to live forever. I don't take no stock in mathematics, anyway.

At first I hated the school, but by and by I got so I could stand it. Whenever I got uncommon tired I played hookey, and the hiding I got next day done me good and cheered me up. So the longer I went to school the easier it got to be. I was getting sort of used to the widow's ways, too, and they warn't so raspy on me.