文档介绍：TOM SAWYER, DETECTIVE
TOM SAWYER,
DETECTIVE
by MARK TWAIN
1
TOM SAWYER, DETECTIVE
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