Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
567 words | Chapter 81
Making them pens was a distressid tough job, and so was the saw; and
Jim allowed the inscription was going to be the toughest of all. That’s
the one which the prisoner has to scrabble on the wall. But he had to
have it; Tom said he’d _got_ to; there warn’t no case of a state
prisoner not scrabbling his inscription to leave behind, and his coat
of arms.
“Look at Lady Jane Grey,” he says; “look at Gilford Dudley; look at old
Northumberland! Why, Huck, s’pose it _is_ considerble trouble?—what you
going to do?—how you going to get around it? Jim’s _got_ to do his
inscription and coat of arms. They all do.”
Jim says:
“Why, Mars Tom, I hain’t got no coat o’ arm; I hain’t got nuffn but
dish yer ole shirt, en you knows I got to keep de journal on dat.”
“Oh, you don’t understand, Jim; a coat of arms is very different.”
“Well,” I says, “Jim’s right, anyway, when he says he ain’t got no coat
of arms, because he hain’t.”
“I reckon _I_ knowed that,” Tom says, “but you bet he’ll have one
before he goes out of this—because he’s going out _right_, and there
ain’t going to be no flaws in his record.”
So whilst me and Jim filed away at the pens on a brickbat apiece, Jim
a-making his’n out of the brass and I making mine out of the spoon, Tom
set to work to think out the coat of arms. By-and-by he said he’d
struck so many good ones he didn’t hardly know which to take, but there
was one which he reckoned he’d decide on. He says:
“On the scutcheon we’ll have a bend _or_ in the dexter base, a saltire
_murrey_ in the fess, with a dog, couchant, for common charge, and
under his foot a chain embattled, for slavery, with a chevron _vert_ in
a chief engrailed, and three invected lines on a field _azure_, with
the nombril points rampant on a dancette indented; crest, a runaway
nigger, _sable_, with his bundle over his shoulder on a bar sinister;
and a couple of gules for supporters, which is you and me; motto,
_Maggiore fretta, minore atto._ Got it out of a book—means the more
haste, the less speed.”
“Geewhillikins,” I says, “but what does the rest of it mean?”
“We ain’t got no time to bother over that,” he says; “we got to dig in
like all git-out.”
“Well, anyway,” I says, “what’s _some_ of it? What’s a fess?”
“A fess—a fess is—_you_ don’t need to know what a fess is. I’ll show
him how to make it when he gets to it.”
“Shucks, Tom,” I says, “I think you might tell a person. What’s a bar
sinister?”
“Oh, _I_ don’t know. But he’s got to have it. All the nobility does.”
That was just his way. If it didn’t suit him to explain a thing to you,
he wouldn’t do it. You might pump at him a week, it wouldn’t make no
difference.
He’d got all that coat of arms business fixed, so now he started in to
finish up the rest of that part of the work, which was to plan out a
mournful inscription—said Jim got to have one, like they all done. He
made up a lot, and wrote them out on a paper, and read them off, so:
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