“Oh, shucks, I’ll be just as careful.
Now lemme try. Say—I’ll give
you the core of my apple.”
“Well, here—No, Ben, now don’t.
I’m afeard—”
“I’ll give you all of it!”
Tom gave up the brush with reluctance in his face,
but alacrity in his heart. And while the late
steamer Big Missouri worked and sweated in the sun,
the retired artist sat on a barrel in the shade close
by, dangled his legs, munched his apple, and planned
the slaughter of more innocents. There was no
lack of material; boys happened along every little
while; they came to jeer, but remained to whitewash.
By the time Ben was fagged out, Tom had traded the
next chance to Billy Fisher for a kite, in good repair;
and when he played out, Johnny Miller bought in for
a dead rat and a string to swing it with—and
so on, and so on, hour after hour. And when the
middle of the afternoon came, from being a poor poverty-stricken
boy in the morning, Tom was literally rolling in wealth.
He had besides the things before mentioned, twelve
marbles, part of a jews-harp, a piece of blue bottle-glass
to look through, a spool cannon, a key that wouldn’t
unlock anything, a fragment of chalk, a glass stopper
of a decanter, a tin soldier, a couple of tadpoles,
six fire-crackers, a kitten with only one eye, a brass
doorknob, a dog-collar—but no dog—the
handle of a knife, four pieces of orange-peel, and
a dilapidated old window sash.
He had had a nice, good, idle time all the while—plenty
of company —and the fence had three coats
of whitewash on it! If he hadn’t run out
of whitewash he would have bankrupted every boy in
the village.
Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow
world, after all. He had discovered a great law
of human action, without knowing it—namely,
that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing,
it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to
attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher,
like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended
that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged
to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is
not obliged to do. And this would help him to
understand why constructing artificial flowers or
performing on a tread-mill is work, while rolling ten-pins
or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement. There
are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse
passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily
line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them
considerable money; but if they were offered wages
for the service, that would turn it into work and
then they would resign.
The boy mused awhile over the substantial change which
had taken place in his worldly circumstances, and
then wended toward headquarters to report.
