And then she'd kind o' spunk up and say, thanks to
glory, she'd kep' her pride.

Well, they was worse places to live in than that
there little town, even if they wasn't no railroad
within eight miles, and only three hundred soles
in the hull copperation. Which Hank's shop and
our house set in the edge of the woods jest outside
the copperation line, so's the city marshal didn't
have no authority to arrest him after he
crossed it.

They was one thing in that house I always
admired when I was a kid. And that was a big
cistern. Most people has their cisterns outside
their house, and they is a tin pipe takes all the rain
water off the roof and scoots it into them. Ourn
worked the same, but our cistern was right in under
our kitchen floor, and they was a trap door with
leather hinges opened into it right by the kitchen
stove. But that wasn't why I was so proud of it.
It was because that cistern was jest plumb full of
fish -- bullheads and red horse and sunfish and
other kinds.

Hank's father had built that cistern. And one
time he brung home some live fish in a bucket and
dumped em in there. And they growed. And
they multiplied in there and refurnished the earth.
So that cistern had got to be a fambly custom, which