"Maude is gone!" she says.
"Gone?" says I. "Whatter you mean, gone?"
"I can't find her no place!" says Ma. "And I looked everywheres!"
This give me a most unpleasant feeling down my back, and I got to my feet in a hurry.
"Are you sure she ain't hid?" I says, "like the last time," I says.
"Come and see for yourself!" says Ma, and I went, you can bet on that! And sure enough, she wasn't in the box. Ma lifted the wire off the top and lifted out the two old sofa cushions we had put in for comfort and only Maude's husband, 'Frisco, was there. He was as usual lying in about five coils like a boiler-heater, with his wicked-looking flat head on the top, and he stuck out his oyster fork of a tongue, and give us a little hiss, much as to say, why was we always disturbing him. But no Maude.
"Ma!" I began, catching a guilty look on her face. "Ma Gilligan, you left that snake out again! After all the times I ast you not to!"
"Well, it was just for a minute!" she says. "I was playing with her, and then I thought maybe the crullers I had made was cool by then and I went and got a few and when I come back she was gone!"
"Well, she's got to be found, that's all!" I snapped. "All this comes from you insisting on keeping in with them low circus people and boarding their acts for them!"
"But Madame Estelle had to stay with her husband when he fell offen the trapeze and they so devoted!" says Ma. "And I didn't take the big snakes—the substitute is using them—but only her own dear pets which the landlady wouldn't leave her have in her room."