The Adventures of Tom Sawyer: Chapters 1-5

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.

She was half sorry her sagacity had miscarried, and half glad that Tom had stumbled into obedient conduct for once.

Tom gave up the brush with reluctance in his face, but alacrity in his heart.

These two great commanders did not condescend to fight in person — that being better suited to the still smaller fry — but sat together on an eminence and conducted the field operations by orders delivered through aides-de-camp.

He had thought he loved her to distraction; he had regarded his passion as adoration; and behold it was only a poor little evanescent partiality.

He worshipped this new angel with furtive eye, till he saw that she had discovered him; then he pretended he did not know she was present, and began to "show off" in all sorts of absurd boyish ways, in order to win her admiration.

Then her conscience reproached her, and she yearned to say something kind and loving; but she judged that this would be construed into a confession that she had been in the wrong, and discipline forbade that.

He knew that in her heart his aunt was on her knees to him, and he was morosely gratified by the consciousness of it.

The window went up, a maid-servant's discordant voice profaned the holy calm, and a deluge of water drenched the prone martyr's remains!

He was fully as uncomfortable as he looked; for there was a restraint about whole clothes and cleanliness that galled him.

Mr. Walters was very earnest of mien, and very sincere and honest at heart; and he held sacred things and places in such reverence, and so separated them from worldly matters, that unconsciously to himself his Sunday-school voice had acquired a peculiar intonation which was wholly absent on week-days.

The congregation being fully assembled, now, the bell rang once more, to warn laggards and stragglers, and then a solemn hush fell upon the church which was only broken by the tittering and whispering of the choir in the gallery.

A good, generous prayer it was, and went into details: it pleaded for the church...and closed with a supplication that the words he was about to speak might find grace and favor, and be as seed sown in fertile ground, yielding in time a grateful harvest of good. Amen.

He was restive all through it; he kept tally of the details of the prayer, unconsciously — for he was not listening, but he knew the ground of old, and the clergyman’s regular route over it — and when a little trifle of new matter was interlarded, his ear detected it and his whole nature resented it; he considered additions unfair, and scoundrelly.

The discourse was resumed presently, but it went lame and halting, all possibility of impressiveness being at an end; for even the gravest sentiments were constantly being received with a smothered burst of unholy mirth, under cover of some remote pew-back, as if the poor parson had said a rarely facetious thing.