Project Gutenberg's Tom Sawyer Abroad, by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

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Title: Tom Sawyer Abroad

Author: Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

Release Date: November, 1993 [Etext #91]
Posting Date: May 12, 2009

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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TOM SAWYER ABROAD

By Mark Twain

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 s