"Mark Twain. Tom Sawyer Abroad (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

Mark Twain.

Tom Sawyer Abroad



Mark Twain. Tom Sawyer Abroad.
Марк Твен. Том Сойер за границей. [Том Сойер - путешественник]
E-mail:
WWW: Mark Twain on Lib.ru
http://andrey.tsx.org/
Изд:
OCR:
SpellCheck: GrAnD
Date: 18.09.2002


Chapter I. TOM SEEKS NEW ADVENTURES


DO you reckon Tom Sawyer was satisfied after all them adventures? I
mean the adventures we had down the river, and the time we set the darky
Jim free and Tom got shot in the leg. No, he wasn't. It only just p'isoned
him for more. That was all the effect it had. You see, when we three came
back up the river in glory, as you may say, from that long travel, and the
village received us with a torchlight procession and speeches, and
everybody hurrah'd and shouted, it made us heroes, and that was what Tom
Sawyer had always been hankering to be.
For a while he WAS satisfied. Everybody made much of him, and he tilted
up his nose and stepped around the town as though he owned it. Some called
him Tom Sawyer the Traveler, and that just swelled him up fit to bust. You
see he laid over me and Jim considerable, because we only went down the
river on a raft and came back by the steamboat, but Tom went by the
steamboat both ways. The boys envied me and Jim a good deal, but land!
they just knuckled to the dirt before TOM.
Well, I don't know; maybe he might have been satisfied if it hadn't
been for old Nat Parsons, which was postmaster, and powerful long and
slim, and kind o' good-hearted and silly, and bald-headed, on account of
his age, and about the talkiest old cretur I ever see. For as much as
thirty years he'd been the only man in the village that had a reputation-I
mean a reputation for being a traveler, and of course he was mortal proud
of it, and it was reckoned that in the course of that thirty years he had
told about that journey over a million times and enjoyed it every time.
And now comes along a boy not quite fifteen, and sets everybody admiring
and gawking over HIS travels, and it just give the poor old man the high
strikes. It made him sick to listen to Tom, and to hear the people say "My
land!" "Did you ever!" "My goodness sakes alive!" and all such things; but
he couldn't pull away from it, any more than a fly that's got its hind leg
fast in the molasses. And always when Tom come to a rest, the poor old
cretur would chip in on HIS same old travels and work them for all they