treated like a dog--like a very dog. She would be sorry some day--maybe

when it was too late. Ah, if he could only die TEMPORARILY!

But the elastic heart of youth cannot be compressed into one

constrained shape long at a time. Tom presently began to drift

insensibly back into the concerns of this life again. What if he turned

his back, now, and disappeared mysteriously? What if he went away--ever

so far away, into unknown countries beyond the seas--and never came

back any more! How would she feel then! The idea of being a clown

recurred to him now, only to fill him with disgust. For frivolity and

jokes and spotted tights were an offense, when they intruded themselves

upon a spirit that was exalted into the vague august realm of the

romantic. No, he would be a soldier, and return after long years, all

war-worn and illustrious. No--better still, he would join the Indians,

and hunt buffaloes and go on the warpath in the mountain ranges and the

trackless great plains of the Far West, and away in the future come

back a great chief, bristling with feathers, hideous with paint, and

prance into Sunday-school, some drowsy summer morning, with a

bloodcurdling war-whoop, and sear the eyeballs of all his companions

with unappeasable envy. But no, there was something gaudier even than

this. He would be a pirate! That was it! NOW his future lay plain

before him, and glowing with unimaginable splendor. How his name would

fill the world, and make people shudder! How gloriously he would go

plowing the dancing seas, in his long, low, black-hulled racer, the

Spirit of the Storm, with his grisly flag flying at the fore! And at

the zenith of his fame, how he would suddenly appear at the old village

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer