Join Host Bree Carlile as she reads the fifth 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 Five About 10:30 the cracked bell of the small church began to ring, and presently the people began to gather for the morning sermon.

The Sunday school children distributed themselves about the house and occupied pews with their parents so as to be under supervision.

Aunt Polly came, and Tom and Sid and Mary sat with her, Tom being placed next to the aisle in order that he might be as far away from the open window and the seductive outside summer scenes as possible.

The crowd filed up the aisles.

The aged and needy postmaster who had seen better days the mayor and his wife, for they had a mayor there, among other unnecessaries, the justice of the Peace, the widow Douglas, fair, smart and 40 a generous, good hearted soul and well to do.

Her hill mansion, the only palace in the town and the most hospitable and much the most lavish in the manner of festivities that St.

Petersburg could boast.

The bent and venerable major and Mrs.

Ward, lawyer Riverson, the new notable, from a distance.

Next, the bell of the village, followed by a troop of lawn clad and ribbon decked young heartbreakers.

Then all the young clerks in town in a body, for they had stood in the vestibule, sucking their caneheads, a circling wall of oiled and simpering admirers, till the last girl had run their GT.

And last of all came the model boy, Willie Mufferson, taking as heedful care of his mother as if she were cut glass.

He always brought his mother to church and was the pride of all the matrons.

The boys all hated him.

He was so good and besides he had been thrown up to them so much.

His white handkerchief was hanging out of his pocket behind as usual on Sundays.

Accidentally, Tom had no handkerchief and he looked upon boys who had as snobs.

The congregation being fully assembled now, the bell rang once more to warn laggards and stragglers.

And then a solemn hush fell upon the church, which was only broken by the tittering and whispering of the choir in the gallery.

The choir always tittered and whispered all through service.

There was once a church choir that was not ill bred, but I've forgotten where it was now.

It was a great many years ago and I can scarcely remember anything about it, but I think it was in some foreign country.

The minister gave out the hymn and read it through with a relish and a peculiar style which was much admired in that part of the country.

His voice began on a medium key and climbed steadily up till it reached a certain point where it bore with strong emphasis upon the topmost word and then plunged down as if from a springboard shall I be carried toe the skies on flowery beds of ease whilst others fight to win the prize and sail through bloody seas.

He was regarded as a wonderful reader at church sociables.

He was always called upon to read poetry.

And when he was through the ladies would lift up their hands and let them fall helplessly in their laps and wall their eyes and shake their heads as much as to say words cannot express it.

It is too beautiful too beautiful for this mortal earth.

After the hymn had been sung, the Reverend Mr.

Sprague turned himself into a bulletin board and read off notices of meetings and societies and things, till it seemed that the list would stretch out to the crack of doom.

A queer custom which is still kept up in America, even in cities away here in this age of abundant newspapers.

Often the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it.

And now the minister prayed.

A good, generous prayer it was, and went into details.

It pleaded for the church and the little children of the church, for the other churches of the village, for the village itself, for the county, for the state, for the state officers, for the United States, for the churches.

Of the United States, for Congress, for the President, for the officers of the government, for poor sailors tossed by stormy seas, for the oppressed millions groaning under the heel of European monarchies and oriental despotisms for such as have the light and the good tidings and yet have not eyes to see, nor ears to hear withal.

For the heathen in the far islands of the sea, enclosed with the supplication that the words he was about to speak might find grace and favor, and be a seed sown in fertile ground, yielding in time a grateful harvest of good amen.

There was a rustling of dresses, and the standing congregation sat down.

The boy whose history this book relates did not enjoy the prayer.

He only endured it.

If he even did that much, he was rusted all through it.

He kept tally of the details of the prayer unconsciously, for he was not listening.

But he knew the ground of old and the clergyman's regular route over it, and when a little trifle of new matter was interlarded, his ear detected it, and his whole nature resented it.

He considered additions unfair and scoundrely.

In the midst of the prayer, a fly had lit on the back of the pew in front of him and tortured his spirit by calmly rubbing its hands together, embracing its head with its arms, and polishing it so vigorously that it seemed to almost part company with the body.

And the slender thread of a neck was exposed to view, scraping its wings with its hind legs and smoothing them to its body as if they had been coattails going through its whole toilet, as tranquilly as if it knew it was perfectly safe as indeed it was, for as sorely as Tom's hands itched to grab for it.

They did not dare.

He believed his soul would be instantly destroyed if he did such a thing while the prayer was going on.

But with a closing sentence, his hand began to curve and steal forward, and the instant the amen was out, the fly was a prisoner of war.

His aunt detected the act and made him let it go.

The minister gave out his text and droned along monotonously through an argument that was so Prozy that many ahead by and by began to nod.

And yet it was an argument that dealt in limitless fire, in brimstone and thinned the predestined elect down to a company so small as to be hardly worth the saving.

Tom counted the pages of the sermon after church.

He always knew how many pages there had been, but he seldom knew anything else about the discourse.

However, this time he was really interested.

For a little while, the minister made a grand and moving picture of the assembling together of the world's hosts at the millennium when the lion and the lamb should lie down together and a little child should lead them.

But the pathos, the lesson, the moral of the great spectacle were lost upon the boy.

He only thought of the conspicuousness of the principal character before the onlooking nations.

His face lit with the thought, and he said to himself that he wished he could be that child if it was a tame lion.

Now he lapsed into suffering again as the dry argument was resumed.

Presently he bethought him of a treasure he had and got it out.

It was a large black beetle with formidable jaws.

A pinch bug, he called it.

It was in a percussion cat box.

The first thing the beetle did was to take him by the finger.

A natural philip followed.

The beetle went floundering into the aisle and lit on its back and the hurt finger went into the boy's mouth.

The beetle lay there working his helpless legs, unable to turn over.

Tom eyed it and longed for it, but it was safe, out of his reach.

Other people, uninterested in the sermon found relief in the beetle, and they eyed it too.

Presently a vagrant poodle dog came idling along, sat at heart, lazy with the summer's softness and the quiet weary of captivity.

Sighing for change, he spied the beetle.

The drooping tail lifted and wagged.

He surveyed the prize, walked around it, smelt at it from a safe distance, walked around it again, grew bolder and took a closer smell, then lifted his lip and made a gingerly s***** at it.

Just missing it.

Made another and another, began to enjoy the diversion, subsided to his stomach with the beetle between his paws and continued his experiments.

Grew weary at last and then indifferent and absent minded.

His head nodded and little by little his chin descended and touched the enemy who seized it.

There was a sharp yelp, a flirt of the poodle's head, and the beetle fell a couple of yards away and lit on its back once more.

The neighboring spectator shook with a gentle inward joy.

Several faces went behind fans and handkerchiefs, and Tom was entirely happy.

The dog looked foolish and probably felt so, but there was resentment in his heart too, and a craving for revenge.

So he went to the beetle and began a wary attack on it again jumping at it from every point of a circle, lighting with his fore paws within an inch of the creature, making even closer, snatches at it with his teeth and jerking his head till his ears flapped again.

But he grew tired once more and after a while tried to amuse himself with a fly, but found no relief.

Followed an ant around with his nose close to the floor and quickly, wearied of that yawned, sighed, forgot the beetle entirely and sat down on it.

Then there was a wild yelp of agony, and the poodle went sailing up the aisle.

The yelps continued, and so did the dog.

He crossed the house in front of the altar, he flew down the other aisle, he crossed before the doors, he clamored up the home stretch.

His anguish grew with his progress till presently he was but a woolly comet moving in its orbit with a gleam and the speed of light.

At last this frantic sufferer sheared from its course.

And sprang into its master's lap.

He flung it out of the window and the voice of distress quickly thinned away and died in the distance.

By this time the whole church was red faced and suffocating with suppressed laughter, and the sermon had come to a dead standstill.

The discourse was resumed presently, but it went lame and halting all possibility of impressiveness being at an end, for even the gravest sentiments were constantly being received with a smothered burst of unholy mirth under cover of some remote pewback, as if the poor parson had said a rarely facetious thing.

It was a genuine relief to the whole congregation.

When the ordeal was over and the benediction pronounced, tom Sawyer went home quite cheerful, thinking to himself that there was some satisfaction about divine service when there was a bit of variety in it.

He had but one.

Marring thought he was willing that the dog should play with his pinch bug, but he did not think it was upright in him to carry it off.

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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Take a look in the broken.

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Take it chapter by chapter, one at a time.

So many adventures and mountains we can climb.