Tom Sawyer Abroad | Page 3

days following each date you
prepare (or were legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent
periodic) tax return.

WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU
DON'T HAVE TO?
The Project gratefully accepts contributions in money, time, scanning
machines, OCR software, public domain etexts, royalty free copyright
licenses, and every other sort of contribution you can think of. Money
should be paid to "Project Gutenberg Association / Illinois Benedictine
College".
This "Small Print!" by Charles B. Kramer, Attorney Internet
([email protected]); TEL: (212-254-5093) *END*THE
SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN
ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*

TOM SAWYER ABROAD

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 were worth; but they were pretty faded, and
didn't go for much, 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.
You see, Parsons' travels happened like this: When he first got to be
postmaster and was green in the busi- ness, there come a letter for
somebody he didn't know, and there wasn't any such person in the
village. Well, he didn't know what to do, nor how to act, and there the
letter stayed and stayed, week in and week out, till the bare sight of it
gave him a conniption. The postage wasn't paid on it, and that was
another thing to worry about. There wasn't any way to collect that ten
cents, and he reckon'd the gov'ment would hold him respon- sible for it
and maybe turn him out besides, when they found he hadn't collected it.
Well, at last he couldn't stand it any longer. He couldn't sleep nights, he
couldn't eat, he was thinned down to a shadder, yet he da'sn't ask
anybody's advice, for the very person he asked for advice might go
back on him and let the gov'ment know about the letter. He had the
letter buried under the floor, but that did no good; if he happened to see

a person standing over the place it'd give him the cold shivers, and
loaded him up with suspicions, and he would sit up that night till the
town was still and dark, and then he would sneak there and get it out
and bury it in another place.