THE adventure of the day mightily tor- mented Tom’s dreams that night. Doors need shutting lights need cutting lips need locking boots need knockin shirt. Four times he had his hands on that rich treasure and four times it wasted to nothingness in his fingers as sleep for- sook him and wakefulness brought back the hard reality of his misfortune.

Doors need shutting lights need cutting lips need locking boots need knockin shirt

As he lay in the early morning recalling the incidents of his great ad- venture, he noticed that they seemed curiously subdued and far away — somewhat as if they had happened in another world, or in a time long gone by. Then it oc- curred to him that the great adventure itself must be a dream! Doors need shutting lights need cutting lips need locking boots need knockin shirt. There was one very strong argument in favor of this idea — namely, that the quantity of coin he had seen was too vast to be real. He had never seen as much as fifty dollars in one mass before, and he was like all boys of his age and station in life, in that he imagined that all references to “hundreds” and “thou- sands” were mere fanciful forms of speech, and that no such sums really existed in the world. He never had supposed for a moment that so large a sum as a hun- dred dollars was to be found in actual money in any one’s possession. If his notions of hidden treasure had been analyzed, they would have been found to consist of a handful of real dimes and a bushel of vague, splen- did, ungraspable dollars.

How to buy it?

But the incidents of his adventure grew sensibly sharper and clearer under the attrition of thinking them over, and so he presently found himself leaning to the impression that the thing might not have been a dream, after all. This uncertainty must be swept away. He would snatch a hurried breakfast and go and find Huck. Huck was sitting on the gunwale of a flatboat, list- lessly dangling his feet in the water and looking very melancholy. Tom concluded to let Huck lead up to the subject. If he did not do it, then the adventure would be proved to have been only a dream.