The Adventures of Tom Sawyer: Chapters 31-36

Presently the hide-and-seek frolicking began, and Tom and Becky engaged in it with zeal until the exertion began to grow a trifle wearisome; then they wandered down a sinuous avenue holding their candles aloft and reading the tangled webwork of names, dates, postoffice addresses, and mottoes with which the rocky walls had been frescoed (in candle-smoke).

In one place they found a spacious cavern, from whose ceiling depended a multitude of shining stalactites of the length and circumference of a man’s leg; they walked all about it, wondering and admiring, and presently left it by one of the numerous passages that opened into it.

This shortly brought them to a bewitching spring, whose basin was incrusted with a frostwork of glittering crystals; it was in the midst of a cavern whose walls were supported by many fantastic pillars which had been formed by the joining of great stalactites and stalagmites together, the result of the ceaseless water-drip of centuries.

Tom divided the cake and Becky ate with good appetite, while Tom nibbled at his moiety.

The poor morsel of food only whetted desire.

She had sunk into a dreary apathy and would not be roused.

She told Tom to go with the kite-line and explore if he chose; but she implored him to come back every little while and speak to her; and she made him promise that when the awful time came, he would stay by her and hold her hand until all was over.

About a fortnight after Tom's rescue from the cave, he started off to visit Huck, who had grown plenty strong enough, now, to hear exciting talk, and Tom had some that would interest him, he thought.

He had also contrived to catch a few bats, and these, also, he had eaten, leaving only their claws.

It is falling now; it will still be falling when all these things shall have sunk down the afternoon of history, and the twilight of tradition, and been swallowed up in the thick night of oblivion.

The candles revealed the fact that it was not really a precipice, but only a steep clay hill twenty or thirty feet high.

Huck said with some apprehension — for he was long used to being falsely accused:
“Mr. Jones, we haven’t been doing nothing.”

Each lad had an income, now, that was simply prodigious — a dollar for every week-day in the year and half of the Sundays.

When Becky told her father, in strict confidence, how Tom had taken her whipping at school, the Judge was visibly moved; and when she pleaded grace for the mighty lie which Tom had told in order to shift that whipping from her shoulders to his own, the Judge said with a fine outburst that it was a noble, a generous, a magnanimous lie — a lie that was worthy to hold up its head and march down through history breast to breast with George Washington’s lauded Truth about the hatchet!

He had to eat with a knife and fork; he had to use napkin, cup, and plate; he had to learn his book, he had to go to church; he had to talk so properly that speech was become insipid in his mouth; whithersoever he turned, the bars and shackles of civilization shut him in and bound him hand and foot.