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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. Johnny Miller bought in for a dead rat
and a string to swing it with—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 rolling
in wealth. He had besides the things before mentioned, twelve marbles, part of a jew’s
harp, a piece of blue bottle glass to look through, a key that
wouldn’t unlock anything, a fragment of chalk, a tin soldier, Which sentences Language
a couple of tadpoles, six firecrackers, a kitten with only one spoken by Tom did Connect

eye, a brass doorknob, a dog collar—but no dog—the handle you find interesting?
of a knife, four pieces of orange peel, and a dilapidated old How would you speak
them in your language?
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,
jeer: to make rude and
mocking remarks, typically he would have bankrupted every boy in the village.
in a loud voice
fagged out: very tired Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all.
jew's harp: a small lyre-
shaped musical instrument He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing
fragment: a small piece it—namely, that in order to make a man or a boy want a thing, it
dilapidated: old and in is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.
poor condition
bankrupted: (here) making
someone financially weak —An abridged extract from Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

About the author
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910), best known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humourist.
He tried his hand as a printer, typesetter, riverboat pilot and journalist before earning fame as a writer. While a reporter, he
wrote a humorous story, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, which became very popular and brought him a lot of
success. His travelogues were also well-received. He achieved great success as a writer and public speaker. He is noted for his
novels Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), called ‘the Great American Novel’, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). He is
considered ‘the father of American literature’.
He ‘came in with the comet’, the year the Halley’s Comet appeared, and as he predicted ‘went out with the comet’ on April 21,
1910, the day after Halley’s Comet closed approach to Earth.

Time to answer

A. Choose the correct answer.

1. How did Aunt Polly turn Tom’s Saturday into captivity at hard labour?

by making him eat an apple

by making him whitewash a fence

by making him go to school on a Saturday

by making him sit in the sun all day

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