The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

‘Well, I’m puzzled. Is something the matter?’

‘Please take it,’ says I, ‘and don’t ask me noth-ing — then I won’t have to tell no lies.’

He studied a while, and then he says:

‘Oho-o! I think I see. You want to SELL all your property to me — not give it. That’s the correct idea.’

Then he wrote something on a paper and read it over, and says:

‘There; you see it says ‘for a consideration.’ That means I have bought it of you and paid you for it. Here’s a dollar for you. Now you sign it.’

So I signed it, and left.

Miss Watson’s nigger, Jim, had a hair-ball as big as your fist, which had been took out of the fourth stomach of an ox, and he used to do magic with it. He said there was a spirit inside of it, and it knowed everything. So I went to him that night and told him pap was here again, for I found his tracks in the snow. What I wanted to know was, what he was going to do, and was he going to stay? Jim got out his hair-ball and said something over it, and then he held it up and dropped it on the floor. It fell pretty solid, and only rolled about an inch. Jim tried it again, and then another time, and it acted just the same. Jim got down on his knees, and put his ear against it and listened.