The Fence (Preface, Chapters 1–7)

Preface

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. 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. The Author. Hartford, 1876.

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CHAPTER 1

"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 found him in the closet, his mouth smeared with jam. "There! I might 'a' thought of that closet. What you been doing in there?" "Nothing." "Nothing! Look at your hands. And look at your mouth." "My! Look behind you, aunt!" The old lady whirled round, and snatched her skirts out of danger. The lad fled on the instant, scrambled up the high board-fence, and disappeared over it.

His aunt Polly stood surprised a moment, and then broke into a gentle laugh. "Hang the boy, can't I never learn anything? He's full of the Old Scratch, but laws-a-me! he's my own dead sister's boy, poor thing, and I ain't got the heart to lash him, somehow. Every time I let him off, my conscience does hurt me so, and every time I hit him my old heart most breaks."

That evening Tom fought a new boy in town, a boy in fine clothes, with shoes on a Friday and a necktie, and got the better of him.

CHAPTER 2

Saturday morning was come, and all the summer world was bright and fresh, and brimming with life. Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden.

Then Ben Rogers came by, eating an apple and imitating a steamboat. "Hello, old chap, you got to work, hey?" Tom contemplated the boy a bit, and said: "What do you call work? Well, maybe it is, and maybe it ain't. All I know, is, it suits Tom Sawyer. Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?" That put the thing in a new light. Ben stopped nibbling his apple. Tom swept his brush daintily back and forth, stepped back to note the effect, added a touch here and there. Ben watched every move and got more and more interested, more and more absorbed. "Say, Tom, let me whitewash a little." Tom considered, was about to consent, but he altered his mind: Aunt Polly was awful particular about this fence. "I'll give you the core of my apple." "No, Ben, 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.

By the middle of the afternoon, from being a poor poverty-stricken boy in the morning, Tom was literally rolling in wealth: 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 tin soldier, a couple of tadpoles, six fire-crackers, a kitten with only one eye, a brass door-knob, a dog-collar but no dog, and a dead rat and a string to swing it with. And the fence had three coats of whitewash on it.

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. Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

CHAPTERS 3–5

As he passed by the house where Jeff Thatcher lived, he saw a new girl in the garden: a lovely little blue-eyed creature with yellow hair plaited into two long tails, white summer frock and embroidered pantalettes. The fresh-crowned hero fell without firing a shot. A certain Amy Lawrence vanished out of his heart and left not even a memory of herself behind. He worshipped this new angel with furtive eye, till he saw that she had discovered him; then he pretended he did not know she was present, and began to "show off" in all sorts of absurd boyish ways. She tossed a pansy over the fence before she went in.

On Sunday, at Sunday school, the great Judge Thatcher came to visit, with his family, and Tom, who had traded the spoils of the fence for enough of the coloured tickets awarded for memorizing Bible verses, stepped forward to claim the prize, a Bible, to the amazement of all. But when the Judge asked him to name the first two disciples, Tom blurted out: "David and Goliath!" Let us draw the curtain of charity over the rest of the scene.

In church, during the long sermon, Tom let loose a pinch-bug, a large black beetle with formidable jaws, which nipped a poodle dog, which went sailing up the aisle with a yelp of agony; and the whole congregation was red-faced and suffocating with suppressed laughter.

CHAPTER 6

Monday morning found Tom Sawyer miserable. He invented a sore toe, then a loose tooth, to keep from school; Aunt Polly pulled the tooth out with a silk thread tied to the bedpost and a chunk of fire thrust in his face. On the way to school he met Huckleberry Finn, son of the town drunkard. Huckleberry was cordially hated and dreaded by all the mothers of the town, because he was idle and lawless and vulgar and bad, and because all their children admired him so, and delighted in his forbidden society, and wished they dared to be like him. Huckleberry came and went, at his own free will. He slept on doorsteps in fine weather and in empty hogsheads in wet; he did not have to go to school or to church, or call any being master or obey anybody; he never had to wash, nor put on clean clothes; he could swear wonderfully. In a word, everything that goes to make life precious that boy had. He was carrying a dead cat, for curing warts, by a method requiring a graveyard at midnight and a freshly buried sinner.

Tom came late to school, and admitted he had stopped to talk with Huckleberry Finn. The master whipped him, and ordered him to go and sit with the girls; and the only vacant place was beside the new girl, Becky Thatcher.

CHAPTER 7

He drew a house on his slate for her, and wrote "I love you" and hid it with his hand. At noon they stayed in the schoolhouse alone, and he asked her whether she had ever been engaged. "What's that?" "Why, engaged to be married. You only just tell a boy you won't ever have anybody but him, ever ever ever, and then you kiss, and that's all." She did, in the end; and then Tom, in his happiness, let slip that he had been engaged to Amy Lawrence before. Becky began to cry. Tom marched out of the house and over the hills and far away, to return to school no more that day.

(End of Episode 1 — continued in Episode 2: The Graveyard)