Most likely we would have slept till noon that first morning at uncle’s place, but he didn’t let us. Uncle had an idea that day began as soon as you could see to get around without a lantern, and it didn’t seem to me that I had finished slapping a mosquito that buzzed around me before I went to sleep when somebody jerked the cover off me and yelled, “Grub-pile.” I got one eye open enough to see Uncle Hieronymous standing there grinning like all git out, and Mark and Tallow and Plunk squirming around disgusted in bed.
“Bacon’s frizzlin’,” says uncle. “I let you oversleep this mornin’, figgerin’ you was wore out. Come a-runnin’! Git up! Why, it’ll be noon in a matter of eight hours!”
There was a smell of something coming in from the kitchen that waked me up quick. I got my feet out on the floor and looked over at Mark Tidd. He was sitting on the bed, with his pudgy nose pointing to the door and sniffing away with the happiest expression I ever saw on his face. Part of the smell was bacon, and part of it was frying potatoes, but the best of it was something else better than both of them put together, and I couldn’t make out what it was.
“Hungry?” says Uncle Hieronymous.
Mark answered him. “I c-c-could eat the tail of the whale that s-s-swallered Jonah,” says he.
We dressed in a hurry so we could get nearer to that smell. By the time we were washed uncle had everything on the table, and we rushed at it like we’d been fasting for forty days and forty nights. Then we saw where the best part of the smell came from. It was little fish all brown and crisp outside—a heaping platter of them.
“Troutses,” says Uncle Hieronymous. “Leetle speckled troutses. Ketched by me personal right in my front yard, so to speak. Got ’em special for you jest before startin’ to the station.” Then he made up another little poem:
“When you see a leetle trout
You’d sooner eat than go without.”
Nobody said another word until there wasn’t a thing left on the table but little heaps of fish-bones. Uncle moved back his chair and grinned, and we all grinned back at him. We felt just like grinning. I don’t know when I’ve felt so good.