Long Description:Tom gave up the brush with reluctance in his face, but alacrity in
his heart. And while the late steamer Big Missouri worked and
sweated in the sun, the retired artist sat on a barrel in the shade
close by, dangled his legs, munched his apple, and planned the
slaughter of more innocents. There was no lack of material; boys
happened along every little while; they came to jeer, but remained
to whitewash. By the time Ben was fagged out, Tom had traded the
next chance to Billy Fisher for a kite, in good repair; and when he
played out, Johnny Miller bought in for a dead rat and a string to
swing it with – and so on, and so on, hour after hour. And when the
middle of the afternoon came, from being a poor poverty-stricken
boy in the morning, Tom was literally rolling in wealth. He had
besides the things before mentioned, twelve marbles,part of a
jews-harp, a piece of blue bottle-glass to look through, a spool
cannon, a key that wouldn’t unlock anything, a fragment of chalk, a
glass stopper of a decanter, a tin soldier, a couple of tadpoles,
six fire-crackers, a kitten with only one eye, a brass door-knob, a
dog-collar – but no dog – the handle of a knife, four pieces of
orange-peel, and a dilapidated old window sash.
He had had a nice, good, idle time all the while – plenty of
company – and the fence had three coats of whitewash on it! If he
hadn’t run out of whitewash he would have bankrupted every boy in
the village.
Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after
all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing
it – namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it
is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had
been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he
would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body
is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not
obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why
constructing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill is
work, while rolling ten-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only
amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive
four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily
line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable
money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would
turn it into work and then they would resign.
The boy mused awhile over the substantial change which had taken
place in his worldly circumstances, and then wended toward
headquarters to report.
~ selection from Chapter Two of Mark Twain's "Tom Sawyer" (1876)
("http://www.pbs.org/marktwain/learnmore/writings_tom.html"
target="_blank">visit link)