conscience=little person inside of you:)

Mary Twain turns the message of “a conscience is actually good for making people behave” into a joke. He does this because he does not believe that the conscience is the main thing that controls everything you do. He makes the joke that whenever his grandmother comes over and starts to yell at him about the smoking, his conscience gets very groggy, tired, and then falls asleep. I guess he is saying that his conscience does not care at all about his grandmother or he is saying he does not care at all when someone tells him how bad it is for him and for him to stop smoking .
When he makes a joke of this message, he is doing so because he does not believe that the conscience can control the actions of a person. He believes that it is a little person inside of you that you can ignore and can just put away whenever you want to. The way he puts it in the story, a person can control his conscience, the conscience does not control the person. He is frightened though when his “little person” of a conscience freaks out when something he has done bad is thought to be extremely bad. Normally the actions he does feel bad about are very minuscule and would not mean anything to a person if they were not the person who actually committed the action. He is frightened at the beginning of the story because the little person of a conscience tells him that he has cheated the woman out of food when it was there and he also told the lady that the chef was not in the kitchen when he was right on the other side of the wall in the kitchen. When the conscience tells him this, it frightens him because he was the only person who knew that the woman asked for food and that the chef was there.