Twain's Huck Finn (Chapters 1-11)

“Well, all right. Don’t stand there palavering all day, but out with you and see if there’s a fish on the lines for breakfast. I’ll be along in a minute.”

There was two old dirty calico dresses, and a sun-bonnet, and some women’s underclothes hanging against the wall, and some men’s clothing, too.

Then they tucked the old man into a beautiful room, which was the spare room, and in the night some time he got powerful thirsty and clumb out on to the porch-roof and slid down a stanchion and traded his new coat for a jug of forty-rod, and clumb back again and had a good old time; and towards daylight he crawled out again, drunk as a fiddler, and rolled off the porch and broke his left arm in two places, and was most froze to death when somebody found him after sun-up.

We got an old tin lantern, and a butcher-knife without any handle, and a bran-new Barlow knife worth two bits in any store, and a lot of tallow candles, and a tin candlestick, and a gourd, and a tin cup, and a ratty old bedquilt off the bed, and a reticule with needles and pins and beeswax...

I thought it all out, and reckoned I would belong to the widow’s if he wanted me, though I couldn’t make out how he was a-going to be any better off then than what he was before, seeing I was so ignorant, and so kind of low-down and ornery.

Well, then I happened to think how they always put quicksilver in loaves of bread and float them off, because they always go right to the drownded carcass and stop there.

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.

There was a seedy old chest, and an old hair trunk with the hinges broke.

They peddle out such a fish as that by the pound in the market-house there; everybody buys some of him; his meat’s as white as snow and makes a good fry.

They had come up from the quarry and stood around the stile a while, and then went on around the garden fence.

And after supper he talked to him about temperance and such things till the old man cried, and said he’d been a fool, and fooled away his life; but now he was a-going to turn over a new leaf and be a man nobody wouldn’t be ashamed of, and he hoped the judge would help him and not look down on him.

I catched a catfish and haggled him open with my saw, and towards sundown I started my camp fire and had supper.

Then he went down on all fours and crawled off, begging them to let him alone, and he rolled himself up in his blanket and wallowed in under the old pine table, still a-begging; and then he went to crying.

I says, now I reckon the widow or the parson or somebody prayed that this bread would find me, and here it has gone and done it.

He never could go after even a turnip-cart but he must have the swords and guns all scoured up for it, though they was only lath and broomsticks, and you might scour at them till you rotted, and then they warn’t worth a mouthful of ashes more than what they was before.

"You’ve put on considerable many frills since I been away. I’ll take you down a peg before I get done with you. You’re educated, too, they say—can read and write. You think you’re better’n your father, now, don’t you, because he can’t? I’ll take it out of you. Who told you you might meddle with such hifalut’n foolishness, hey?—who told you you could?”

Here’s a govment that calls itself a govment, and lets on to be a govment, and thinks it is a govment, and yet’s got to set stock-still for six whole months before it can take a hold of a prowling, thieving, infernal, white-shirted free nigger, and—”

He jumped up yelling, and the first thing the light showed was the varmint curled up and ready for another spring.

There was a slough or a creek leading out of it on the other side that went miles away, I don’t know where, but it didn’t go to the river.

So we unhitched a skiff and pulled down the river two mile and a half, to the big scar on the hillside, and went ashore.

Sometimes I’ve a mighty notion to just leave the country for good and all.

When breakfast was ready we lolled on the grass and eat it smoking hot.

I was all over welts.

“Why, blame it all, we’ve got to do it. Don’t I tell you it’s in the books? Do you want to go to doing different from what’s in the books, and get things all muddled up?”

But when I got to shore pap wasn’t in sight yet, and as I was running her into a little creek like a gully, all hung over with vines and willows, I struck another idea: I judged I’d hide her good, and then, ’stead of taking to the woods when I run off, I’d go down the river about fifty mile and camp in one place for good, and not have such a rough time tramping on foot.

She went and got the lump of lead and fetched it back, and brought along a hank of yarn which she wanted me to help her with.

After supper pap took the jug, and said he had enough whisky there for two drunks and one delirium tremens.

I asked her if she reckoned Tom Sawyer would go there, and she said not by a considerable sight.

"You’ve put on considerable many frills since I been away. I’ll take you down a peg before I get done with you. You’re educated, too, they say—can read and write. You think you’re better’n your father, now, don’t you, because he can’t? I’ll take it out of you. Who told you you might meddle with such hifalut’n foolishness, hey?—who told you you could?”

And so, take it all around, we made a good haul.

“Well, Ben Rogers, if I was as ignorant as you I wouldn’t let on. Kill the women? No; nobody ever saw anything in the books like that. You fetch them to the cave, and you’re always as polite as pie to them; and by and by they fall in love with you, and never want to go home any more.”

I was getting sort of used to the widow’s ways, too, and they warn’t so raspy on me.

Pretty soon a spider went crawling up my shoulder, and I flipped it off and it lit in the candle; and before I could budge it was all shriveled up.

Then the old man he signed a pledge—made his mark.

The judge and the widow went to law to get the court to take me away from him and let one of them be my guardian; but it was a new judge that had just come, and he didn’t know the old man; so he said courts mustn’t interfere and separate families if they could help it; said he’d druther not take a child away from its father.

“There; you see it says ‘for a consideration.’

The old man said that what a man wanted that was down was sympathy, and the judge said it was so; so they cried again.

Miss Watson she kept pecking at me, and it got tiresome and lonesome.

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.

Well, all at once here comes a canoe; just a beauty, too, about thirteen or fourteen foot long, riding high like a duck.