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The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain
Chapter XXVII
THE
adventure of the day mightily tormented Tom's dreams that night. Four
times he had his hands on that rich treasure and four times it wasted to
nothingness in his fingers as sleep forsook him and wakefulness brought
back the hard reality of his misfortune. As he lay in the early morning
recalling the incidents of his great adventure, he noticed that they
seemed curiously subdued and far away -- somewhat as if they had happened
in another world, or in a time long gone by. Then it occurred to him that
the great adventure itself must be a dream! There was one very strong
argument in favor of this idea -- namely, that the quantity of coin he had
seen was too vast to be real. He had never seen as much as fifty dollars
in one mass before, and he was like all boys of his age and station in
life, in that he imagined that all references to "hundreds" and
"thousands" were mere fanciful forms of speech, and that no such
sums really existed in the world. He never had supposed for a moment that
so large a sum as a hundred dollars was to be found in actual money in any
one's possession. If his notions of hidden treasure had been analyzed,
they would have been found to consist of a handful of real dimes and a
bushel of vague, splendid, ungraspable dollars. But
the incidents of his adventure grew sensibly sharper and clearer under the
attrition of thinking them over, and so he presently found himself leaning
to the impression that the thing might not have been a dream, after all.
This uncertainty must be swept away. He would snatch a hurried breakfast
and go and find Huck. Huck was sitting on the gunwale of a flatboat,
listlessly dangling his feet in the water and looking very melancholy. Tom
concluded to let Huck lead up to the subject. If he did not do it, then
the adventure would be proved to have been only a dream. |
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