erty
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 the pictured page 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 shall I do, what shall 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. Well, of course I ain't going to tell
old Dobbins on this little fool, because there's other ways of getting
even on her, that ain't so mean; but what of it? Old Dobbins will ask
who it was tore his book. Nobody'll answer. Then he'll do just the way
he always does--ask first one and then t'other, and when he comes to the
right girl he'll know it, without any te