Join Host Bree Carlile as she reads the twenty-first chapter of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

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Today we'll be continuing The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain.

Chapter 21 vacation was approaching.

The schoolmaster, always severe, grew severer and more exacting than ever, for he wanted the school to make a good showing on examination day.

His rod and his rule were seldom idle.

Now, at least among the smaller pupils, only the biggest boys and young ladies of 18 and 20 escaped lashing.

Mr.

Dobbins's lashings were very vigorous ones too, for although he carried under his wig a perfectly bald and shiny head, he had only reached middle age, and there was no sign of feebleness in his muscle.

As the great day approached, all the tyranny that was in him came to the surface.

He seemed to take a vindictive pleasure in punishing the least shortcomings.

The consequence was that the smaller boys spent their days in terror, in suffering, and their nights in plotting revenge.

They threw away no opportunity to do the master a mischief, but he kept ahead all the time.

The retribution that followed every vengeful success was so sweeping and majestic that the.

Boys always retired from the field badly.

Worsted at last, they conspired together and hit upon a plan that promised a dazzling victory.

They swore in the sign painter's boy, told him the scheme and asked his help.

He had his own reasons for being delighted, for the master boarded in his father's family and had given the boy ample cause to hate him.

The master's wife would go on a visit to the country in a few days, and there would be nothing to interfere with the plan.

The master always prepared himself for great occasions by getting pretty well funneled, and the sign painter's boy said that when the domini had reached the proper condition on examination evening, he would manage the thing while he napped in his chair.

Then he would have him awakened at the right time and hurried away to school in the fullness of time.

The interesting occasion arrived at eight in the evening.

The schoolhouse was brilliantly lighted and adorned with wreaths and festoons of foliage and flowers.

The master sat thrown in his great chair upon a raised platform with his blackboard behind him.

He was looking tolerably mellow.

Three rows of benches on each side and six rows in front of him were occupied by the dignitaries of the town and by the parents of the pupils.

To his left.

Back of the rows of citizens was a spacious temporary platform, upon which receded the scholars who were to take part in the exercises of the evening.

Rows of small boys washed and dressed to an intolerable state of discomfort rows of gawky big boys, snowbanks of girls and young ladies, clad in lawn and muslin, and conspicuously conscious of their bare arms, their grandmother's ancient trinkets, their bits of pink and blue ribbon, and the flowers in their hair.

All the rest of the house was filled with nonparticipating scholars.

The exercises began.

A very little boy stood up and sheepishly recited you'd scarce expect one of my age to speak in public, on the stage, etc.

Accompanying himself with the painfully exact and spasmodic gestures which a machine might have used, supposing the machine to be a trifle out of order.

But he got through safely, though cruelly scared, and got a fine round of applause when he made his manufactured bow and retired.

A little shamefaced girl, lisped Mary had a little lamb, etc.

Performed a compassion inspiring curtsy, got her meat of applause and sat down, flushed and happy.

Tom Sawyer stepped forward with conceited confidence and soared into the unquenchable and indestructible give me liberty or give me death speech with fine fury and frantic gesticulation, and broke down in the middle of it.

A ghastly stage fright seized him, his legs quaked under him, and he was like to choke.

True, he had the manifest sympathy of the house, but he had the house's silence too, which was even worse than its sympathy.

The master frowned and this completed the disaster.

Tom struggled a while and then retired, utterly defeated.

There was a weak attempted applause, but it died early.

The boys stood on the burning deck, followed also the Assyrian came down, and other declamatory gems.

Then there were reading exercises and a spelling fight.

The meager Latin class recited with honor.

The prime feature of the evening was in order now original compositions by the young ladies, each in her turn, stepped forward to the edge of the platform, cleared her throat, held up her manuscript tied with dainty ribbon, and proceeded to read with labored attention to expression and punctuation.

The themes were the same that had been illuminated upon similar occasions by their mothers before them, their grandmothers, and, doubtless, all their ancestors.

In the female line clear back to the Crusades.

Friendship was one memories of other days, religion and history, dreamland, the advantages of culture, forms of political government compared and contrasted melancholy, filial, love, heart, longings, et cetera, et cetera.

A prevalent feature in these compositions was a nursed and petted melancholy.

Another was a wasteful and opulent gush of fine language.

Another was a tendency to lug in by the ears particularly prized words and phrases until they were worn entirely out.

And a peculiarity that conspicuously marked and marred them was the inveterate and intolerable sermon that wagged its crippled tail at the end of each and every one of them.

No matter what the subject might be, a brainwracking effort was made to squirm it into some aspect or other than the moral and religious mind could contemplate with edification.

The glaring insincerity of these sermons was not sufficient to compass the banishment of the fashion from the schools, and it is not sufficient today.

It never will be sufficient while the world stands.

Perhaps there's no school in all our land where the young ladies do not feel obliged to close their compositions with a sermon.

And you will find that the sermon of the most frivolous and the least religious girl in the school is always the longest and most relentlessly pious.

But enough of this homely truth is unpalatable.

Let us return to the examination.

The first composition that was read was the one entitled Is This Then Life?

Perhaps the reader can endure an extract from it and the common walks of life.

With what delightful emotions does the youthful mind look forward to?

Some anticipated scene of festivity imagination is busy sketching roast tinted pictures of joy in fancy.

The voluptuous votary of fashion sees herself amid the festive throng, the observed of all the observers, her graceful form arrayed in snowy robes and whirling through the mazes of the joyous dance.

Her eye is brightest, her step is lightest in the gay assembly.

In such delicious fancies, time quickly glides by, and the welcome hour arrives for her entrance into the Elysian world of which she has had such bright dreams.

How fairy like does everything appear to her enchanted vision?

Each new scene is more charming than the last, but after a while she finds that beneath this goodly exterior all is vanity.

The flattery which once charmed her soul now grates harshly upon her ear.

The ballroom has lost its charms, and with wasted health and embittered heart, she turns away with the conviction that earthly pleasures cannot satisfy the longings of the soul.

And so forth and so on.

There was a buzz of gratification from time to time during the reading, accompanied by whispered ejaculations of how sweet, how eloquent, so true, etc.

And after the thing had closed with a peculiarly afflicting sermon, the applause was enthusiastic.

Then arose a slim, melancholy girl whose face had the interesting paleness that comes of pills and indigestion.

And read a poem.

Two stanzas of it will do.

A Missouri maiden's farewell to Alabama.

Alabama, goodbye I love thee well but.

Yet for a while do I leave.

Thee now sad, yes, sad thoughts of thee my heart doth swell and burning recollections throng my brow for I've wandered through thy flowery woods have roamed in red near talapaloosa's stream have listened to Tallahassee's warring floods and wooed on CUSA's side aurora's beam.

Yet shame I not to bear an awful heart nor blush to turn behind my tearful eyes tis from no stranger land I now must part tis to no strangers left I yield these sighs welcome and home were mine within this state whose veils I leave, whose spires fade fast from me and cold must be mine eyes and heart and teet where, dear Alabama?

They turn cold on thee.

There were very few there who knew what teet meant, but the poem was very satisfactory nevertheless.

Next appeared a dark complexioned, black eyed, black haired young lady, who paused an impressive moment, assumed a tragic expression, and began to read in a measured, solemn tone a vision, dark and tempestuous was night around the throne on high.

Not a single star quivered, but the deep intonations of the heavy thunder constantly vibrated upon the ear, whilst the terrific lightning reveled in angry mood through the cloudy chambers of heaven, seeming to scorn the power exerted over its terror by the illustrious Franklin.

Even the boisterous winds unanimously came forth from their mystic homes, and blustered about as if to enhance by their aid the wildness of the scene.

At such a time, so dark, so dreary for human sympathy, my very spirit sighed.

But instead thereof, my dearest friend, my counselor, my comfort and guide, my joy and grief, my second bliss and joy came to my side.

She moved like one of those bright beings pictured in the sunny walks of Fancies, eaten by the romantic and young, a queen of beauty, unadorned saved by her own transcendent loveliness.

So soft was her step, it failed to make even a sound.

And but for the magical thrill imparted by her genial touch as other unobtrusive beauties, she would have glided away unperceived, unthought.

A strange sadness rested upon her features.

Like icy tears upon the robe of.

December as she pointed to the contending elements without and bade me contemplate the two beings presented.

This nightmare occupied some ten pages of manuscript, and wound up with a sermon so destructive of all hope to non Presbyterians that it took the first prize.

This composition was considered to be the very finest effort of the evening.

The mayor of the village, and delivering the prize to the author of it, made a warm speech in which he said that it was by far the most eloquent thing he had ever listened to, and that Daniel Webster himself might well be proud of it.

It may be remarked in passing that the number of compositions in which the word beautyous was overfondled, and human experience referred to as life's page was up to the usual average.

Now the master, mellow almost to the verge of geniality, put his chair aside, turned his back to the audience, and began to draw a map of America on the blackboard to exercise the geography class upon.

But he made a sad business of it with his unsteady hand, and a smothered titter rippled over the house.

He knew what the matter was, and he set himself to ride it.

He sponged out lines and remade them, but he only distorted them more than ever, and the tittering was more pronounced.

He threw his entire attention upon his work.

Now, as if determined not to be put down by the mirth, he felt that all eyes were fastened upon him.

He imagined he was succeeding.

And yet the tittering continued.

It even manifestly increased.

And while it might, there was a garret above, pierced with a scuttle over his head, and down through this scuttle came a cat, suspended around the haunches by a string.

She had a rag tied about her.

Head and jaws to keep her from mewing.

As she slowly descended, she curved upward and clawed at the string.

She swung downward and clawed at the intangible air.

The tittering rose higher and higher.

The cat was within six inches of the absorbed teacher's head.

Down, down a little lower, and she grabbed his wig with her desperate claws, clung to it, and was snatched up into the garret in an instant, with her trophy still in her possession.

And how the light did blaze abroad from the master's bald pate, for the sign painter's boy had gilded it that broke up the meeting.

The boys were avenged vacation had come.

Note the pretended compositions quoted in this chapter are taken without alteration from a volume entitled prose and Poetry by a Western Lady.

But they're exactly and precisely after the schoolgirl pattern, and hence are much happier than any mere imitations could be.

Thank you for joining Bite at a.

Time Books today, while we read a bite of one of your favorite classics.

Again, my name is Brie Carlyle, and I hope you come back tomorrow for the next bite of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

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