Author: Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
Release Date: July 1, 2004 [EBook #74]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** Start of this project gutenberg
EBOOK Tom Sawyer ***
Produced by David Widger. The previous edition
was update by Jose
Menendez.
The adventures
of Tom Sawyer
by
mark Twain
(Samuel Langhorne Clemens)
P R E F
A C E
Most of the adventures recorded in this book
really occurred; one or two were experiences of my
own, the rest those of boys who were schoolmates of
mine. Huck Finn is drawn from life; Tom Sawyer
also, but not from an individual—he is
a combination of the characteristics of three boys
whom I knew, and therefore belongs to the composite
order of architecture.
The odd superstitions touched upon were all prevalent
among children and slaves in the West at the period
of this story—that is to say, thirty or
forty years ago.
Although my book is intended mainly for the entertainment
of boys and girls, I hope it will not be shunned by
men and women on that account, for part of my plan
has been to try to pleasantly remind adults of what
they once were themselves, and of how they felt and
thought and talked, and what queer enterprises they
sometimes engaged in.
Theauthor.
Hartford, 1876.
T O M S
A W Y E R
“Tom!”
No answer.
“Tom!”
No answer.
“What’s gone with that boy, I wonder?
You Tom!”
No answer.
The old lady pulled her spectacles down and looked
over them about the room; then she put them up and
looked out under them. She seldom or never looked
through them for so small a thing as a boy; they
were her state pair, the pride of her heart, and were
built for “style,” not service—she
could have seen through a pair of stove-lids just as
well. She looked perplexed for a moment, and
then said, not fiercely, but still loud enough for
the furniture to hear:
“Well, I lay if I get hold of you I’ll—”
She did not finish, for by this time she was bending
down and punching under the bed with the broom, and
so she needed breath to punctuate the punches with.
She resurrected nothing but the cat.
“I never did see the beat of that boy!”
She went to the open door and stood in it and looked
out among the tomato vines and “jimpson”
weeds that constituted the garden. No Tom.
So she lifted up her voice at an angle calculated for
distance and shouted:
“Y-o-u-u Tom!”
There was a slight noise behind her and she turned
just in time to seize a small boy by the slack of
his roundabout and arrest his flight.
