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Mark Twain.


Tom Sawyer, Detective



Mark Twain. Tom Sawyer, Detective.
Марк Твен. Том Сойер - сыщик.
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WWW: Mark Twain on Lib.ru
http://andrey.tsx.org/
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Date: 18.09.2002


Chapter I. AN INVITATION FOR TOM AND HUCK


[Footnote: Strange as the incidents of this story are, they are not
inventions, but facts-even to the public confession of the accused. I take
them from an old-time Swedish criminal trial, change the actors, and
transfer the scenes to America. I have added some details, but only a
couple of them are important ones. - M. T.]

WELL, it was the next spring after me and Tom Sawyer set our old nigger
Jim free, the time he was chained up for a runaway slave down there on
Tom's uncle Silas's farm in Arkansaw. The frost was working out of the
ground, and out of the air, too, and it was getting closer and closer onto
barefoot time every day; and next it would be marble time, and next
mumbletypeg, and next tops and hoops, and next kites, and then right away
it would be summer and going in a-swimming. It just makes a boy homesick
to look ahead like that and see how far off summer is. Yes, and it sets
him to sighing and saddening around, and there's something the matter with
him, he don't know what. But anyway, he gets out by himself and mopes and
thinks; and mostly he hunts for a lonesome place high up on the hill in
the edge of the woods, and sets there and looks away off on the big
Mississippi down there a-reaching miles and miles around the points where
the timber looks smoky and dim it's so far off and still, and everything's
so solemn it seems like everybody you've loved is dead and gone, and you
'most wish you was dead and gone too, and done with it all.
Don't you know what that is? It's spring fever. That is what the name
of it is. And when you've got it, you want-oh, you don't quite know what
it is you DO want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it
so! It seems to you that mainly what you want is to get away; get away
from the same old tedious things you're so used to seeing and so tired of,
and set something new. That is the idea; you want to go and be a wanderer;
you want to go wandering far away to strange countries where everything is