Scene: The Mississippi Valley Time: Forty
to fifty years ago
You don’t know about me without you have
read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer;
but that ain’t no matter. That book was
made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly.
There was things which he stretched, but mainly he
told the truth. That is nothing. I never
seen anybody but lied one time or another, without
it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary.
Aunt Polly—Tom’s Aunt Polly, she
is—and Mary, and the Widow Douglas is all
told about in that book, which is mostly a true book,
with some stretchers, as I said before.
Now the way that the book winds up is this:
Tom and me found the money that the robbers hid in
the cave, and it made us rich. We got six thousand
dollars apiece—all gold. It was an
awful sight of money when it was piled up. Well,
Judge Thatcher he took it and put it out at interest,
and it fetched us a dollar a day apiece all the year
round —more than a body could tell what
to do with. The Widow Douglas she took me for
her son, and allowed she would sivilize me; but it
was rough living in the house all the time, considering
how dismal regular and decent the widow was in all
her ways; and so when I couldn’t stand it no
longer I lit out. I got into my old rags and
my sugar-hogshead again, and was free and satisfied.
But Tom Sawyer he hunted me up and said he was going
to start a band of robbers, and I might join if I would
go back to the widow and be respectable. So
I went back.
The widow she cried over me, and called me a poor
lost lamb, and she called me a lot of other names,
too, but she never meant no harm by it. She put
me in them new clothes again, and I couldn’t
do nothing but sweat and sweat, and feel all cramped
up. Well, then, the old thing commenced again.
The widow rung a bell for supper, and you had to come
to time. When you got to the table you couldn’t
go right to eating, but you had to wait for the widow
to tuck down her head and grumble a little over the
victuals, though there warn’t really anything
the matter with them,—that is, nothing
only everything was cooked by itself. In a barrel
of odds and ends it is different; things get mixed
up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and the things
go better.
After supper she got out her book and learned me about
Moses and the Bulrushers, and I was in a sweat to
find out all about him; but by and by she let it out
that Moses had been dead a considerable long time;
so then I didn’t care no more about him, because
I don’t take no stock in dead people.
Pretty soon I wanted to smoke, and asked the widow
to let me. But she wouldn’t. She
said it was a mean practice and wasn’t clean,
and I must try to not do it any more. That is
just the way with some people. They get down
on a thing when they don’t know nothing about
it. Here she was a-bothering about Moses, which
was no kin to her, and no use to anybody, being gone,
you see, yet finding a power of fault with me for doing
a thing that had some good in it. And she took
snuff, too; of course that was all right, because
she done it herself.
