Tom Sawyer, Detective

CHAPTER I.
AN INVITATION FOR TOM AND HUCK

[Note: Strange as the incidents of this story are, they are not inventions, butfacts—even to the public confession of the accused. I take them from anold-time Swedish criminal trial, change the actors, and transfer the scenes toAmerica. I have added some details, but only a couple of them are importantones. — M. T.]

Well, it was the next spring after me and Tom Sawyer set our old nigger Jimfree, the time he was chained up for a runaway slave down there on Tom’suncle Silas’s farm in Arkansaw. The frost was working out of the ground,and out of the air, too, and it was getting closer and closer onto barefoottime every day; and next it would be marble time, and next mumbletypeg, andnext tops and hoops, and next kites, and then right away it would be summer andgoing in a-swimming. It just makes a boy homesick to look ahead like that andsee how far off summer is. Yes, and it sets him to sighing and saddeningaround, and there’s something the matter with him, he don’t knowwhat. But anyway, he gets out by himself and mopes and thinks; and mostly hehunts for a lonesome place high up on the hill in the edge of the woods, andsets there and looks away off on the big Mississippi down there a-reachingmiles and miles around the points where the timber looks smoky and dimit’s so far off and still, and everything’s so solemn it seems likeeverybody you’ve loved is dead and gone, and you ’most wish you wasdead and gone too, and done with it all.

Don’t you know what that is? It’s spring fever. That is what thename of it is. And when you’ve got it, you want—oh, you don’tquite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heartache, you want it so! It seems to you that mainly what you want is to get away;get away from the same old tedious things you’re so used to seeing and sotired of, and set something new. That is the idea; you want to go and be awanderer; you want to go wandering far away to strange countries whereeverything is mysterious and wonderful and romantic. And if you can’t dothat, you’ll put up with considerable less; you’ll go anywhere youcan go, just so as to get away, and be thankful of the chance, too.

Well, me and T

BU KİTABI OKUMAK İÇİN ÜYE OLUN VEYA GİRİŞ YAPIN!

Sitemize Üyelik ÜCRETSİZDİR!