The adventures of tom sawyer

By Mark Twain

Tom started to school and had the luck of coming upon Becky Thatcher at the Meadow Lane. His mood always determined his manner. Without a moment's hesitation he ran to her and said:

"I acted mighty mean today, Becky, and I'm so sorry. I won't ever, ever do that way again, as long as ever I live - please make up, won't you?"

The girl stopped and looked him scornfully in the face:

"I'll thank you to keep yourself to yourself, Mr. Thomas Sawyer. I'll never speak to you again."

She tossed her head and passed on. Tom was so stunned that he said nothing. But he was in a fine rage, nevertheless. He moped into the schoolyard wishing she were a boy, and imaging how he would trounce her if she were. He presently encountered her and delivered a stinging remark as he passed. She hurled one in return and the angry breach was complete.

Poor girl, she did not know how fast she was nearing trouble herself. The master, Mr. Dobbins, had reached middle age with an unsatisfied ambition. The darling of his desires was to be a doctor, but poverty had decreed that he should be nothing higher than a village schoolmaster. Every day he took a mysterious book out of his desk and absorbed himself in it at times when no classes were reciting. He kept that book under lock and key. There was not an urchin in school but was perishing to have a glimpse of it, but the chance never came. Every boy and girl had a theory about the nature of that book; but no two theories were alike, and there was no way of getting at the facts in the case. Now, as Becky was passing by the desk, which stood near the door, she noticed that the key was in the lock! It was a precious moment. She glanced around; found herself alone, and the next instant she had the book in her hands. The title-page - Professor Somebody's Anatomy - carried no information to her mind; so she began to turn the leaves. She came at once upon a handsomely engraved and colored frontispiece - a human figure, stark naked. At that moment a shadow fell on the page and Tom Sawyer stepped in at the door, and caught a glimpse of the picture. Becky snatched at the book to close it, and had the hard luck to tear pictured plate half down the middle. She thrust the volume into the desk, turned the key, and burst out crying with shame and vexation.

"Tom Sawyer, you are just as mean as you can be, to sneak up on a person and look at what they're looking at."

"How could I know you was looking at anything?"

"You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Tom Sawyer; you know you're going to tell on me, and oh, what shell I do, what shell I do! I'll be whipped, and I never was whipped in school."

Then she stamped her little foot and said:

"Be so mean if you want to! I know something that's going to happen. You just wait and you'll see! Hateful, hateful, hateful!" - and she flung out of the house with a new explosion of crying.

Tom stood still, rather flustered by this onslaught. Presently he said to himself:

"What a curious kind of a fool a girl is. Never been licked in school! Shucks. What's a licking! That's just like a girl - they're so thin-skinned and chicken-hearted."

THE MAN OF PROPERTY"(1)