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He
was regarded as a wonderful reader. At church "sociables" he was
always called upon to read poetry; and when he was through, the ladies
would lift up their hands and let them fall helplessly in their laps, and
"wall" their eyes, and shake their heads, as much as to say,
"Words cannot express it; it is too beautiful, TOO beautiful for this
mortal earth."
After
the hymn had been sung, the Rev. Mr. Sprague turned himself into a
bulletin-board, and read off "notices" of meetings and societies
and things till it seemed that the list would stretch out to the crack of
doom -- a queer custom which is still kept up in America, even in cities,
away here in this age of abundant newspapers. Often, the less there is to
justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it.
And
now the minister prayed. A good, generous prayer it was, and went into
details: it pleaded for the church, and the little children of the church;
for the other churches of the village; for the village itself; for the
county; for the State; for the State officers; for the United States; for
the churches of the United States; for Congress; for the President; for
the officers of the Government; for poor sailors, tossed by stormy seas;
for the oppressed millions groaning under the heel of European monarchies
and Oriental despotisms; for such as have the light and the good tidings,
and yet have not eyes to see nor ears to hear withal; for the heathen in
the far islands of the sea; 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.
There
was a rustling of dresses, and the standing congregation sat down. The boy
whose history this book relates did not enjoy the prayer, he only endured
it -- if he even did that much. 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. In the midst of the prayer a fly had
lit on the back of the pew in front of him and tortured his spirit by
calmly rubbing its hands together, embracing its head with its arms, and
polishing it so vigorously that it seemed to almost part company with the
body, and the slender thread of a neck was exposed to view; scraping its
wings with its hind legs and smoothing them to its body as if they had
been coat-tails; going through its whole toilet as tranquilly as if it
knew it was perfectly safe. As indeed it was; for as sorely as Tom's hands
itched to grab for it they did not dare -- he believed his soul would be
instantly destroyed if he did such a thing while the prayer was going on.
But with the closing sentence his hand began to curve and steal forward;
and the instant the "Amen" was out the fly was a prisoner of
war. His aunt detected the act and made him let it go.
The
minister gave out his text and droned along monotonously through an
argument that was so prosy that many a head by and by began to nod -- and
yet it was an argument that dealt in limitless fire and brimstone and
thinned the predestined elect down to a company so small as to be hardly
worth the saving. Tom counted the pages of the sermon; after church he
always knew how many pages there had been, but he seldom knew anything
else about the discourse. However, this time he was really interested for
a little while. The minister made a grand and moving picture of the
assembling together of the world's hosts at the millennium when the lion
and the lamb should lie down together and a little child should lead them.
But the pathos, the lesson, the moral of the great spectacle were lost
upon the boy; he only thought of the conspicuousness of the principal
character before the on-looking nations; his face lit with the thought,
and he said to himself that he wished he could be that child, if it was a
tame lion.
Now
he lapsed into suffering again, as the dry argument was resumed. Presently
he bethought him of a treasure he had and got it out. It was a large black
beetle with formidable jaws -- a "pinchbug," he called it. It
was in a percussion-cap box. The first thing the beetle did was to take
him by the finger. A natural fillip followed, the beetle went floundering
into the aisle and lit on its back, and the hurt finger went into the
boy's mouth. The beetle lay there working its helpless legs, unable to
turn over. Tom eyed it, and longed for it; but it was safe out of his
reach. Other people uninterested in the sermon found relief in the beetle,
and they eyed it too. Presently a vagrant poodle dog came idling along,
sad at heart, lazy with the summer softness and the quiet, weary of
captivity, sighing for change. He spied the beetle; the drooping tail
lifted and wagged. He surveyed the prize; walked around it; smelt at it
from a safe distance; walked around it again; grew bolder, and took a
closer smell; then lifted his lip and made a gingerly snatch at it, just
missing it; made another, and another; began to enjoy the diversion;
subsided to his stomach with the beetle between his paws, and continued
his experiments; grew weary at last, and then indifferent and
absent-minded. His head nodded, and little by little his chin descended
and touched the enemy, who seized it. There was a sharp yelp, a flirt of
the poodle's head, and the beetle fell a couple of yards away, and lit on
its back once more. The neighboring spectators shook with a gentle inward
joy, several faces went behind fans and handkerchiefs, and Tom was
entirely happy. The dog looked foolish, and probably felt so; but there
was resentment in his heart, too, and a craving for revenge. So he went to
the beetle and began a wary attack on it again; jumping at it from every
point of a circle, lighting with his fore-paws within an inch of the
creature, making even closer snatches at it with his teeth, and jerking
his head till his ears flapped again. But he grew tired once more, after a
while; tried to amuse himself with a fly but found no relief; followed an
ant around, with his nose close to the floor, and quickly wearied of that;
yawned, sighed, forgot the beetle entirely, and sat down on it. Then there
was a wild yelp of agony and the poodle went sailing up the aisle; the
yelps continued, and so did the dog; he crossed the house in front of the
altar; he flew down the other aisle; he crossed before the doors; he
clamored up the home-stretch; his anguish grew with his progress, till
presently he was but a woolly comet moving in its orbit with the gleam and
the speed of light. At last the frantic sufferer sheered from its course,
and sprang into its master's lap; he flung it out of the window, and the
voice of distress quickly thinned away and died in the distance.
By
this time the whole church was red-faced and suffocating with suppressed
laughter, and the sermon had come to a dead standstill. 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. It was a genuine relief to the whole congregation when
the ordeal was over and the benediction pronounced.
Tom
Sawyer went home quite cheerful, thinking to himself that there was some
satisfaction about divine service when there was a bit of variety in it.
He had but one marring thought; he was willing that the dog should play
with his pinchbug, but he did not think it was upright in him to carry it
off.
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