★ Tom Sawyer : the funniest part
I recently got a Kindle and of course could not resist reading Tom Sawyer again. Here is the funniest part of the Twain’s novel. Tom and Huck have found a cave where to play and hide and hosting a treasure.
- “All along I’ve been wanting to be a robber, but I knew I’d got to have a thing like this, and where to run across it was the bother. We’ve got it now, and we’ll keep it quiet, only we’ll let Joe Harper and Ben Rogers in—because of course there’s got to be a Gang, or else there wouldn’t be any style about it.
Tom Sawyer’s Gang—it sounds splendid, don’t it, Huck?”
- “Well, it just does, Tom. And who’ll we rob?”
- “Oh, most anybody. Waylay people—that’s mostly the way.”
- “And kill them?”
- “No, not always. Hive them in the cave till they raise a ransom.”
- “What’s a ransom?”
- “Money. You make them raise all they can, off’n their friends; and after you’ve kept them a year, if it ain’t raised then you kill them. That’s the general way. Only you don’t kill the women. You shut up the women, but you don’t kill them. They’re always beautiful and rich, and awfully scared. You take their watches and things, but you always take your hat off and talk polite. They ain’t anybody as polite as robbers —you’ll see that in any book. Well, the women get to loving you, and after they’ve been in the cave a week or two weeks they stop crying and after that you couldn’t get them to leave. If you drove them out they’d turn right around and come back. It’s so in all the books.”
- “Why, it’s real bully, Tom. I believe it’s better’n to be a pirate.”
- “Yes, it’s better in some ways, because it’s close to home and
circuses and all that.
(…)
- “We’ll keep them there all the time, and we’ll hold our orgies there, too. It’s an awful snug place for orgies.”
- “What orgies?”
- “I dono. But robbers always have orgies, and of course we’ve got to have them, too. Come along, Huck, we’ve been in here a long time. It’s getting late, I reckon.”
