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At last he was satisfied that time had ceased and eternity begun; he began to doze, in spite of himself; the clock chimed eleven, but he did not hear it.

And then there came, mingling with his half-formed dreams, a most melancholy caterwauling.

The raising of a neighboring window disturbed him.

A cry of "Scat! you devil!" and the crash of an empty bottle against the back of his aunt's woodshed brought him wide awake, and a single minute later he was dressed and out of the window and creeping along the roof of the "ell" on all fours.

He "meow'd" with caution once or twice, as he went; then jumped to the roof of the woodshed and thence to the ground.

Huckleberry Finn was there, with his dead cat.

The boys moved off and disappeared in the gloom.

At the end of half an hour they were wading through the tall grass of the graveyard.

It was a graveyard of the old-fashioned Western kind.

It was on a hill, about a mile and a half from the village.

It had a crazy board fence around it, which leaned inward in places, and outward the rest of the time, but stood upright nowhere.

Grass and weeds grew rank over the whole cemetery.

All the old graves were sunken in, there was not a tombstone on the place; round-topped, worm-eaten boards staggered over the graves, leaning for support and finding none.

"Sacred to the memory of" So-and-So had been painted on them once, but it could no longer have been read, on the most of them, now, even if there had been light.

A faint wind moaned through the trees, and Tom feared it might be the spirits of the dead, complaining at being disturbed.

The boys talked little, and only under their breath, for the time and the place and the pervading solemnity and silence oppressed their spirits.

They found the sharp new heap they were seeking, and ensconced themselves within the protection of three great elms that grew in a bunch within a few feet of the grave.

Then they waited in silence for what seemed a long time. The hooting of a distant owl was all the sound that troubled the dead stillness. Tom's reflections grew oppressive. He must force some talk. So he said in a whisper:

"Hucky, do you believe the dead people like it for us to be here?"

Huckleberry whispered:

"I wisht I knowed. It's awful solemn like, ain't it?"

"I bet it is."

There was a considerable pause, while the boys canvassed this matter inwardly. Then Tom whispered:

"Say, Hucky-do you reckon Hoss Williams hears us talking?"

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