Tom Sawyer Abroad

DO you reckon Tom Sawyer was satisfied after all them adventures? I meanthe adventures we had down the river, and the time we set the darky Jimfree and Tom got shot in the leg. No, he wasn't. It only just p'isonedhim for more. That was all the effect it had. You see, when we three cameback up the river in glory, as you may say, from that long travel, andthe village received us with a torchlight procession and speeches, andeverybody hurrah'd and shouted, it made us heroes, and that was what TomSawyer had always been hankering to be.

For a while he WAS satisfied. Everybody made much of him, and he tiltedup his nose and stepped around the town as though he owned it. Somecalled him Tom Sawyer the Traveler, and that just swelled him up fit tobust. You see he laid over me and Jim considerable, because we only wentdown the river on a raft and came back by the steamboat, but Tom went bythe steamboat both ways. The boys envied me and Jim a good deal, butland! they just knuckled to the dirt before TOM.

Well, I don't know; maybe he might have been satisfied if it hadn't beenfor old Nat Parsons, which was postmaster, and powerful long and slim,and kind o' good-hearted and silly, and bald-headed, on account of hisage, and about the talkiest old cretur I ever see. For as much as thirtyyears he'd been the only man in the village that had a reputation — I meana reputation for being a traveler, and of course he was mortal proud ofit, and it was reckoned that in the course of that thirty years he hadtold about that journey over a million times and enjoyed it every time.And now comes along a boy not quite fifteen, and sets everybody admiringand gawking over HIS travels, and it just give the poor old man the highstrikes. 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 suchthings; but he couldn't pull away from it, any more than a fly that's gotits 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 themfor all they were worth; but they were pretty faded, and didn't go formuch, and it was pitiful to see. And then Tom would take another innings,and then the old man again — and so on, and so on, for an hour and more,each trying to beat out the other.