TOM SAWYER ABROAD

person that hadn’t, and said a person that started in to

carry a cat home by the tail was gitting knowledge that

was always going to be useful to him, and warn’t ever

going to grow dim or doubtful. But I can tell you,

Jim, Uncle Abner was down on them people that’s all

the time trying to dig a lesson out of everything that

happens, no matter whether –”

But Jim was asleep. Tom looked kind of ashamed,

because you know a person always feels bad when he

is talking uncommon fine and thinks the other person

is admiring, and that other person goes to sleep that

way. Of course he oughtn’t to go to sleep, because

it’s shabby; but the finer a person talks the certainer

it is to make you sleep, and so when you come to look

at it it ain’t nobody’s fault in particular; both of

them’s to blame.

Jim begun to snore — soft and blubbery at first,

then a long rasp, then a stronger one, then a half a

dozen horrible ones like the last water sucking down

the plug-hole of a bath-tub, then the same with more

power to it, and some big coughs and snorts flung in,

the way a cow does that is choking to death; and

when the person has got to that point he is at his level

best, and can wake up a man that is in the next block

with a dipperful of loddanum in him, but can’t wake

himself up although all that awful noise of his’n ain’t

but three inches from his own ears. And that is the

curiosest thing in the world, seems to me. But you

rake a match to light the candle, and that little bit of a

noise will fetch him. I wish I knowed what was the

reason of that, but there don’t seem to be no way to

find out. Now there was Jim alarming the whole

Desert, and yanking the animals out, for miles and

miles around, to see what in the nation was going on

up there; there warn’t nobody nor nothing that was as

close to the noise as HE was, and yet he was the only

cretur that wasn’t disturbed by it. We yelled at him

and whooped at him, it never done no good; but the

first time there come a little wee noise that wasn’t of a

usual kind it woke him up. No, sir, I’ve thought it

all over, and so has Tom, and there ain’t no way to

find out why a snorer can’t hear himself snore.

Jim said he hadn’t been asleep; he just shut his eyes

so he could listen better.

Tom said nobody warn’t accusing him.

That made him look like he wished he hadn’t said

anything. And he wanted to git away from the sub-

ject, I reckon, because he begun to abuse the camel-

driver, just the way a person does when he has got

catched in something and wants to take it out of some-

body else. He let into the camel-driver the hardest he

knowed how, and I had to agree with him; and he

praised up the dervish the highest he could, and I had

to agree with him there, too. But Tom says:

“I ain’t so sure. You call that dervish so dreadful

liberal and good and unselfish, but I don’t quite see it.

He didn’t hunt up another poor dervish, did he? No,

he didn’t. If he was so unselfish, why didn’t he go in

there himself and take a pocketful of jewels and go

along and be satisfied? No, sir, the person he was

hunting for was a man with a hundred camels. He

wanted to get away with all the treasure he could.”

“Why, Mars Tom, he was willin’ to divide, fair and

square; he only struck for fifty camels.”

“Because he knowed how he was going to get all of

them by and by.”

“Mars Tom, he TOLE de man de truck would make

him bline.”

“Yes, because he knowed the man’s character. It

was just the kind of a man he was hunting for — a

man that never believes in anybody’s word or any-

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