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They said their prayers inwardly, and lying down, since there was nobody there with authority to make them kneel and recite aloud; in truth, they had a mind not to say them at all, but they were afraid to proceed to such lengths as that, lest they might call down a sudden and special thunderbolt from heaven.

Then at once they reached and hovered upon the imminent verge of sleep-but an intruder came, now, that would not "down." It was conscience.

They began to feel a vague fear that they had been doing wrong to run away; and next they thought of the stolen meat, and then the real torture came.

They tried to argue it away by reminding conscience that they had purloined sweetmeats and apples scores of times; but conscience was not to be appeased by such thin plausibilities; it seemed to them, in the end, that there was no getting around the stubborn fact that taking sweetmeats was only "hooking," while taking bacon and hams and such valuables was plain simple stealing-and there was a command against that in the Bible.

So they inwardly resolved that so long as they remained in the business, their piracies should not again be sullied with the crime of stealing.

Then conscience granted a truce, and these curiously inconsistent pirates fell peacefully to sleep.

WHEN Tom awoke in the morning, he wondered where he was.

He sat up and rubbed his eyes and looked around.

Then he comprehended.

It was the cool gray dawn, and there was a delicious sense of repose and peace in the deep pervading calm and silence of the woods.

Not a leaf stirred; not a sound obtruded upon great Nature's meditation.

Beaded dewdrops stood upon the leaves and grasses.

A white layer of ashes covered the fire, and a thin blue breath of smoke rose straight into the air.

Joe and Huck still slept.

Now, far away in the woods a bird called; another answered; presently the hammering of a woodpecker was heard.

Gradually the cool dim gray of the morning whitened, and as gradually sounds multiplied and life manifested itself.

The marvel of Nature shaking off sleep and going to work unfolded itself to the musing boy.

A little green worm came crawling over a dewy leaf, lifting two-thirds of his body into the air from time to time and "sniffing around," then proceeding again-for he was measuring, Tom said; and when the worm approached him, of its own accord, he sat as still as a stone, with his hopes rising and falling, by turns, as the creature still came toward him or seemed inclined to go elsewhere; and when at last it considered a painful moment with its curved body in the air and then came decisively down upon Tom's leg and began a journey over him, his whole heart was glad-for that meant that he was going to have a new suit of clothes-without the shadow of a doubt a gaudy piratical uniform.

Now a procession of ants appeared, from nowhere in particular, and went about their labors; one struggled manfully by with a dead spider five times as big as itself in its arms, and lugged it straight up a tree-trunk.

A brown spotted lady-bug climbed the dizzy height of a grass blade, and Tom bent down close to it and said, "Lady-bug, lady-bug, fly away home, your house is on fire, your children's alone," and she took wing and went off to see about it-which did not surprise the boy, for he knew of old that this insect was credulous about conflagrations, and he had practised upon its simplicity more than once.

A tumblebug came next, heaving sturdily at its ball, and Tom touched the creature, to see it shut its legs against its body and pretend to be dead.

The birds were fairly rioting by this time.

A catbird, the Northern mocker, lit in a tree over Tom's head, and trilled out her imitations of her neighbors in a rapture of enjoyment; then a shrill jay swept down, a flash of blue flame, and stopped on a twig almost within the boy's reach, cocked his head to one side and eyed the strangers with a consuming curiosity; a gray squirrel and a big fellow of the "fox" kind came skurrying along, sitting up at intervals to inspect and chatter at the boys, for the wild things had probably never seen a human being before and scarcely knew whether to be afraid or not.

CHAPTER XIV

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