Adventure stories; Americans -- Foreign countries -- Fiction; Balloon ascensions -- Fiction; Sawyer, Tom (Fictitious character) -- Fiction
And we left the bird and the train both behind, ’_way_ behind,
and done it easy, too.
But Tom he was huffy, and said me and Jim was a couple of ignorant
blatherskites, and then he says:
“Suppose there’s a brown calf and a big brown dog, and an artist is
making a picture of them. What is the _main_ thing that that artist has
got to do? He has got to paint them so you can tell them apart the
minute you look at them, hain’t he? Of course. Well, then, do you want
him to go and paint _both_ of them brown? Certainly you don’t. He
paints one of them blue, and then you can’t make no mistake. It’s just
the same with the maps. That’s why they make every State a different
color; it ain’t to deceive you, it’s to keep you from deceiving
yourself.”
But I couldn’t see no argument about that, and neither could Jim. Jim
shook his head, and says:
“Why, Mars Tom, if you knowed what chuckle-heads dem painters is, you’d
wait a long time before you’d fetch one er _dem_ in to back up a fac’.
I’s gwine to tell you, den you kin see for you’self. I see one of ’em
a-paintin’ away, one day, down in ole Hank Wilson’s back lot, en I went
down to see, en he was paintin’ dat old brindle cow wid de near horn
gone—you knows de one I means. En I ast him what he’s paintin’ her for,
en he say when he git her painted, de picture’s wuth a hundred dollars.
Mars Tom, he could a got de cow fer fifteen, en I tole him so. Well,
sah, if you’ll b’lieve me, he jes’ shuck his head, dat painter did, en
went on a-dobbin’. Bless you, Mars Tom, _dey_ don’t know nothin’.”
Tom lost his temper. I notice a person ’most always does that’s got
laid out in an argument. He told us to shut up, and maybe we’d feel
better. Then he see a town clock away off down yonder, and he took up
the glass and looked at it, and then looked at his silver turnip, and
then at the clock, and then at the turnip again, and says:
“That’s funny! That clock’s near about an hour fast.”
So he put up his turnip. Then he see another clock, and took a look,
and it was an hour fast too. That puzzled him.
“That’s a mighty curious thing,” he says. “I don’t understand it.”
Then he took the glass and hunted up another clock, and sure enough it
was an hour fast too. Then his eyes began to spread and his breath to
come out kinder gaspy like, and he says:
“Ger-reat Scott, it’s the _longitude!_”
I says, considerably scared:
“Well, what’s been and gone and happened now?”
“Why, the thing that’s happened is that this old bladder has slid over
Illinois and Indiana and Ohio like nothing, and this is the east end of
Pennsylvania or New York, or somewheres around there.”
“Tom Sawyer, you don’t mean it!”
“Yes, I do, and it’s dead sure. We’ve covered about fifteen degrees of
longitude since we left St. Louis yesterday afternoon, and them clocks
are right. We’ve come close on to eight hundred miles.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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