скачать книгу бесплатно
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Mark Twain
HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.‘Now he found out a new thing – namely, that to promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.’An idyllic snapshot of a boy’s childhood along the banks of the Mississippi River, Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is the author’s work that comes closest to his boyhood experiences of growing up in Hannibal in the 1840s.Mischievous and full of energy, Tom enjoys childish pranks and pastimes with his friends, Huck Finn, the town outcast and Joe Harper, his best friend. However, at the town graveyard, Huck and Tom witness a murder, carried out by local vagabond Injun Joe. They vow never to tell a soul about what they have seen and so begins their journey into adulthood as Tom wrestles with his own morality, guilt and anxiety.A ‘coming of age’ tale, it is through Tom’s adventures and relationships with others that he becomes more responsible and more aware of his own inner conflict. Through the central characters of Tom and Huck, Twain satirises the moral rigidity of society and adult hypocrisy, whilst at the same time giving a nostalgic portrayal of a young boy’s journey into adulthood.
THE ADVENTURES
OF TOM SAWYER
Mark Twain
COPYRIGHT (#ulink_e1d1113a-3fa6-5ff7-acae-e87b9d8af32f)
Harper Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Life & Times section by Gerard Cheshire
Classic Literature: Words and Phrases adapted from
Collins English Dictionary
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.
Source ISBN: 9780007420117
Ebook Edition APRIL 2012 ISBN: 9780007480685
Version: 2015-04-15
CONTENTS
Cover (#u104406db-75bd-576b-9e07-43cd58ea8112)
Title Page (#uffd80eb7-0b08-56ec-978d-f63a83a9c4a6)
Copyright (#ulink_d582fca6-7b07-5416-97e4-3d4b541be790)
Preface (#ulink_bc8c1879-4d9a-5974-b555-c1df78212834)
Chapter 1 (#ulink_9c946a19-7080-5654-8af5-9875695ce0df)
Chapter 2 (#ulink_dbc712a7-5695-5bf5-b1d2-185d4d32b2e2)
Chapter 3 (#ulink_f7221eec-8e9f-5d4f-b7b1-2d128b0766b9)
Chapter 4 (#ulink_ddef938f-a964-5e62-bfb0-05de4bbf1991)
Chapter 5 (#ulink_c86181b9-713a-5163-9324-d6c4e7805ae5)
Chapter 6 (#ulink_57ca8931-c5fd-5045-96e8-fff29e7cab14)
Chapter 7 (#ulink_f3dbc104-047d-5a2f-aa73-7ea7a01aaba8)
Chapter 8 (#ulink_8111f713-9860-559f-9004-156297be6b62)
Chapter 9 (#ulink_5c1eb8ba-f7f5-57d0-83fc-dde882580333)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Conclusion (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Classic Literature: Words and Phrases Adapted from the Collins English Dictionary (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
History of Collins (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PREFACE (#ulink_f492593e-9b57-502b-af8b-52bafb75d039)
Most of the adventures recorded in this book really occurred; one or two were experiences of my own, the rest those of boys who were schoolmates of mine. Huck Finn is drawn from life; Tom Sawyer also, but not from an individual: he is a combination of the characteristics of three boys whom I knew, and therefore belongs to the composite order of architecture.
The odd superstitions touched upon were all prevalent among children and slaves in the West at the period of this story; that is to say, thirty or forty years ago.
Although my book is intended mainly for the entertainment of boys and girls, I hope it will not be shunned by men and women on that account, for part of my plan has been to try pleasantly to remind adults of what they once were themselves, and of how they felt and thought and talked, and what queer enterprises they sometimes engaged in.
The Author
Hartford: 1876
CHAPTER 1 (#ulink_d5b7c6c3-3f23-5186-b480-91db82f8a73f)
‘TOM!’
No answer.
‘Tom!’
No answer.
‘What’s gone with that boy, I wonder? You Tom!’
The old lady pulled her spectacles down and looked over them about the room; then she put them up and looked out under them. She seldom or never looked through them for so small a thing as a boy, for they were her state pair, the pride of her heart, and were built for ‘style,’ not service; she could have seen through a pair of stove-lids as well. She looked perplexed a moment and said, not fiercely, but still loud enough for the furniture to hear, ‘Well, I lay if I get hold of you, I’ll—’
She did not finish, for by this time she was bending down and punching under the bed with the broom, and so she needed breath to punctuate the punches with. She resurrected nothing but the cat.
‘I never did see the beat of that boy!’
She went to the open door and stood in it, and looked out among the tomato vines and ‘jimpson’ weeds that constituted the garden. No Tom. So she lifted up her voice at an angle calculated for distance, and shouted:
‘Y-o-u-u Tom!’
There was a slight noise behind her, and she turned just in time to seize a small boy by the slack of his roundabout and arrest his flight. ‘There! I might a thought of that closet. What you been doing in there?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing! Look at your hands, and look at your mouth. What is that truck?’
‘I don’t know, aunt.’
‘Well, I know. It’s jam, that’s what it is. Forty times I’ve said if you didn’t let that jam alone I’d skin you. Hand me that switch.’
The switch hovered in the air. The peril was desperate. ‘My! Look behind you, aunt!’
The old lady whirled round, and snatched her skirts out of danger, and the lad fled on the instant, scrambled up the high board-fence, and disappeared over it. His Aunt Polly stood surprised a moment, and then broke into a gentle laugh.
‘Hang the boy, can’t I never learn anything? Ain’t he played me tricks enough like that for me to be looking out for him by this time? But old fools is the biggest fools there is. Can’t learn any old dog new tricks, as the saying is. But, my goodness, he never plays them alike two days, and how is a body to know what’s coming? He ’pears to know just how long he can torment me before I get my dander up, and he knows if he can make out to put me off for a minute or make me laugh, it’s all down again, and I can’t hit him a lick. I ain’t doing my duty by that boy, and that’s the Lord’s truth, goodness knows. Spare the rod and spile the child, as the good book says. I’m a-laying up sin and suffering for us both, I know. He’s full of the old scratch, but laws-a-me! he’s my own dead sister’s boy, poor thing, and I ain’t got the heart to lash him, somehow. Every time I let him off my conscience does hurt me so; and every time I hit him my old heart most breaks. Well-a-well, man that is born of a woman is of few days and full of trouble, as the Scripture says, and I reckon it’s so. He’ll play hookey this evening,
and I’ll just be obliged to make him work to-morrow, to punish him. It’s mighty hard to make him work Saturdays, when all the boys is having a holiday, but he hates work more than he hates anything else, and I’ve got to do some of my duty by him, or I’ll be the ruination of the child.’
Tom did play hookey, and he had a very good time. He got back home barely in season to help Jim, the small coloured boy, saw next day’s wood, and split the kindlings before supper – at least he was there in time to tell his adventures to Jim while Jim did three-fourths of the work. Tom’s younger brother (or rather, half-brother) Sid was already through with his part of the work (picking up chips), for he was a quiet boy, and had no adventurous, troublesome ways. While Tom was eating his supper and stealing sugar as opportunity offered, Aunt Polly asked him questions that were full of guile, and very deep – for she wanted to trap him into damaging revealments. Like many other simple-hearted souls, it was her pet vanity to believe she was endowed with a talent for dark and mysterious diplomacy, and she loved to contemplate her most transparent devices as marvels of low cunning. Said she: ‘Tom, it was middling warm in school, warn’t it?’
‘Yes’m.’
‘Powerful warm, warn’t it?’
‘Yes’m.’
‘Didn’t you want to go in a-swimming, Tom?’
A bit of a scare shot through Tom – a touch of uncomfortable suspicion. He searched Aunt Polly’s face, but it told him nothing. So he said:
‘No ’m – well, not very much.’
The old lady reached out her hand and felt Tom’s shirt, and said:
‘But you ain’t too warm now, though.’
