The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Hidden Treasures Unearthed

The Boy’s Salvation

Room No. 2

The Next Day’s Conference

Treasures

Uncle Jake

Buck at Home

The Haunted Room

“Run for Your Life”

McDougal’s Cave

Inside the Cave

Huck on Duty

A Rousing Act

Tail Piece

The Welshman

Result of a Sneeze

Cornered

Alarming Discoveries

Tom and Becky stir up the Town

Tom’s Marks

Huck Questions the Widow

Vampires

Wonders of the Cave

Attacked by Natives

Despair

The Wedding Cake

A New Terror

Daylight

“Turn Out” to Receive Tom and Becky

The Escape from the Cave

Fate of the Ragged Man

The Treasures Found

Caught at Last

Drop after Drop

Having a Good Time

A Business Trip

“Got it at Last!”

Tail Piece

Widow Douglas

Tom Backs his Statement

Tail Piece

Huck Transformed

Comfortable Once More

High up in Society

Contentment

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, and therefore belongs to the composite order of architecture.

The odd superstitions touched upon were all prevalent among children and slaves in the West at the period of this story—that is to say, thirty or forty years ago.

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.

CHAPTER I

“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 could have seen through a pair of stove-lids just as well. She looked perplexed for a moment, and then said, not fiercely, but still loud enough for the furniture to hear:

“Well, I lay if I get hold of you I’ll—”

She did not finish, for by this time she was bending down and punching under the bed with the broom, and so she needed breath to punctuate the punches with. She resurrected nothing but the cat.

“I never did see the beat of that boy!”

She went to the open door and stood in it and looked out among the tomato vines and “jimpson” weeds that constituted the garden. No Tom. So she lifted up her voice at an angle calculated for distance and shouted: