Tom Sawyer, Detective
contributor: Eric Lease Morgan (Infomotions, Inc.)
creator: Twain, Mark
date: 0000-00-00
extent: 128808
format: text/plain
language: en
publisher: Wiretap Electronic Text Archive
rights: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/GPL/2.0/
source: detective.mt
subject: tom
subject: silas
subject: uncle
subject: jubiter
subject: time
subject: placed
subject: public
subject: domain
subject: invitation
subject: huck
subject: footnote
subject: strange
subject: incidents
subject: story
subject: twain
subject: mark
subject: sawyer
subject: detective
subject: american
subject: literature
type: text
local mirror: twain-tom-40.txt
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plain html: twain-tom-40.htm
sort title: Tom Sawyer, Detective
full text: Internet Wiretap Edition of TOM SAWYER, DETECTIVE by MARK TWAIN From "The Writings of Mark Twain, Volume XX" Copyright 1903, Samuel Clemens. This text is placed in the Public Domain, May 1993. Electronic edition by <dell@wiretap.spies.com> TOM SAWYER, DETECTIVE CHAPTER I. AN INVITATION FOR TOM AND HUCK [Footnote: Strange as the incidents of this story are, they are not inventions, but facts -- even to the public confession of the accused. I take them from an old-time Swedish criminal trial, change the actors, and transfer the scenes to America. I have added some details, but only a couple of them are important ones. -- M. T.] WELL, it was the next spring after me and Tom Sawyer set our old nigger Jim free, the time he was chained up for a runaway slave down there on Tom's uncle 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 barefoot time every day; and next it would be marble time, and next mumbletypeg, and next tops and hoops, and next kites, and then right away it would be summer and go- ing in a-swimming. It just makes a boy homesick to look ahead like that and see how far off summer is. Yes, and it sets him to sighing and saddening around, and there's something the matter with him, he don't know what. But anyway, he gets out by himself and mopes and thinks; and mostly he hunts for a lone- some place high up on the hill in the edge of the woods, and sets there and looks away off on the big Mississippi down there a-reaching miles and miles around the points where the timber looks smoky and dim it's so far off and still, and everything's so solemn it seems like everybody you've loved is dead and gone, and you 'most wish you was dead and gone too, and done with it all. Don't you know what that is? It's spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you've got it, you want -- oh, you don't quite know what it is you DO want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want…