Page 184 - the-adventures-of-tom-sawyer

not the shadow of a doubt that all this hubbub was about
him. He believed he had taxed the forbearance of the pow-
ers above to the extremity of endurance and that this was
the result. It might have seemed to him a waste of pomp
and ammunition to kill a bug with a battery of artillery, but
there seemed nothing incongruous about the getting up
such an expensive thunderstorm as this to knock the turf
from under an insect like himself.
By and by the tempest spent itself and died without ac-
complishing its object. The boy’s first impulse was to be
grateful, and reform. His second was to wait — for there
might not be any more storms.
The next day the doctors were back; Tom had relapsed.
The three weeks he spent on his back this time seemed an
entire age. When he got abroad at last he was hardly grate-
ful that he had been spared, remembering how lonely was
his estate, how companionless and forlorn he was. He drift-
ed listlessly down the street and found Jim Hollis acting as
judge in a juvenile court that was trying a cat for murder, in
the presence of her victim, a bird. He found Joe Harper and
Huck Finn up an alley eating a stolen melon. Poor lads! they
— like Tom — had suffered a relapse.

1