Adventures of Tom Sawyer Chapter 1

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 looked perplexed for a moment, and then said, not fiercely, but still loud enough for the furniture to hear:

She went to the open door and stood in it and looked out among the tomato vines and "jimpson" weeds that constituted the garden.

There was a slight noise behind her and she turned just in time to seize a small boy by the slack of his roundabout and arrest his flight.

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.

While Tom was eating his supper, and stealing sugar as opportunity offered, Aunt Polly asked him questions that were full of guile, and very deep--for she wanted to trap him into damaging revealments.

Aunt Polly was vexed to think she had overlooked that bit of circumstantial evidence, and missed a trick.

She was half sorry her sagacity had miscarried, and half glad that Tom had stumbled into obedient conduct for once.

Confound it! sometimes she sews it with white, and sometimes she sews it with black.

This new interest was a valued novelty in whistling, which he had just acquired from a negro, and he was suffering to practise it undisturbed.

It consisted in a peculiar bird-like turn, a sort of liquid warble, produced by touching the tongue to the roof of the mouth at short intervals in the midst of the music--the reader probably remembers how to do it, if he has ever been a boy.

Diligence and attention soon gave him the knack of it, and he strode down the street with his mouth full of harmony and his soul full of gratitude.

Diligence and attention soon gave him the knack of it, and he strode down the street with his mouth full of harmony and his soul full of gratitude.

His cap was a dainty thing, his close-buttoned blue cloth roundabout was new and natty, and so were his pantaloons.

The new boy took two broad coppers out of his pocket and held them out with derision.

To which Tom responded with jeers, and started off in high feather, and as soon as his back was turned the new boy snatched up a stone, threw it and hit him between the shoulders and then turned tail and ran like an antelope.