Mitch Miller | Page 2

the fence and make faces and say awful
words which your ma told you was wicked and would make God
punish you if you said 'em: and then supposin' you began to hear your
pa and ma talk of Mr. Miller and what a wonderful man he was, and
Mrs. Miller and what a good woman she was, and about the Miller girls,
how funny and smart they was, and about Mitch Miller, the
wonderfulest boy in town. And supposin' you went with your ma to
visit 'em and when you got there you saw Mr. Miller readin' to Mrs.
Miller, and you saw the Miller girls playin', and you saw Mitch Miller
chewin' gum and readin' a book, and was so taken with the book he
wouldn't play with you, but finally said he'd read to you, and so began
to read from a book which he said was "Tom Sawyer," which was all
about a boy just our age. And supposin' you got the book after a while
and you read it too, but you understood it only because after a while
Mitch explained it to you.
Well, this is the way it began: first the room, then the house--then the
town in a way--and then Mitch--but I got acquainted with him really
and he became my friend as I tell about after a while. Only now I just
tell how things began to clear up as I came out of sleep, as you might
say.
And onct when I was up to Mr. Miller's and he was readin' from
Shakespeare to Mrs. Miller he came to a place where it says, "Our little
life is rounded by a sleep." I remember this because Mr. Miller stopped
and began to talk about it; and Mitch looked up from readin' "Tom
Sawyer," and I began to think about the sleep I came out of, and how
things at first seemed kind of double and like you had taken so-and-so's
cure for consumption which ma says has opium in it. For when I took it
for a cold, things kind of swum around me like a circular looking-glass,
that you could see through somehow, and everything seemed kind of
way off and funny and somethin' to laugh at and not treat as real.

Well, at first, too, everything seemed alive--even sticks and stones; and
the broomstick I made into a gun seemed to have a life or kind of a
memory of somethin'. And when I told Mr. Miller this he says, you're a
savage, or you've been one in some other life, or else maybe you're
repeatin' the life of a savage, and he called it filogenesis, or somethin'
like that.
But anyway, your town comes to you at last; at least the town as it is
then and seems to you then with all the folks in it, and your relatives,
and all their ways and all the stories about 'em. And you get your place
and find your friends, and you find one friend as I found Mitch. And so
you're awake, or as much awake, we'll say, as you are at first in the
morning when you first stretch out of bed. And so you get ready for the
day and the next sleep----
CHAPTER I
I got acquainted with Mitch this way: In the first place when we moved
to Petersburg and got into our house and was settled, one day Bob
Pendleton came to see me. He said he'd come to call--that's the word he
used. You see right in front of our house was Mr. Montgomery's
house--an awful big brick house, with a big yard; and the back of it was
in front of our house with a tall hedge; but there was a place to go
through the hedge, through a grape arbor up to the house, and around to
the front yard. Next to Mr. Montgomery's yard was Bucky Gum's
pasture where he kept his cows. But if you stood down by the pasture
away from Mr. Montgomery's hedge, you could look across and see Mr.
Pendleton's fine brick house where Bob, this boy, lived. Mr. Pendleton
kept a store and a bank and was awful rich; and when Bob came to call
on me my ma was tickled most to death. She wanted me to have nice
friends, boys who would grow up and be prominent in the world. And
when Bob first came she went to the door and let him in and then came
to me and made me wash and comb my hair. So I went in and here was
Bob.
He had on a new suit and shiny shoes and a bow necktie, and he had a
little ring on his finger. But he was so thin