Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Full Text: Chapter 42

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Full Text: Chapter 42 : Page 5

Aunt Sally jumped for her, and most hugged the head off of her, and cried over her, and I found a good enough place for me under the bed, for it was getting pretty sultry for us, seemed to me.  And I peeped out, and in a little while Tom's Aunt Polly shook herself loose and stood there looking across at Tom over her spectacles—kind of grinding him into the earth, you know.  And then she says:

"Yes, you _better_ turn y'r head away—I would if I was you, Tom."

"Oh, deary me!" says Aunt Sally; "_Is_ he changed so?  Why, that ain't _Tom_, it's Sid; Tom's—Tom's—why, where is Tom?  He was here a minute ago."

"You mean where's Huck _Finn_—that's what you mean!  I reckon I hain't raised such a scamp as my Tom all these years not to know him when I _see_ him.  That _would_ be a pretty howdy-do. Come out from under that bed, Huck Finn."

So I done it.  But not feeling brash.

Aunt Sally she was one of the mixed-upest-looking persons I ever see—except one, and that was Uncle Silas, when he come in and they told it all to him.  It kind of made him drunk, as you may say, and he didn't know nothing at all the rest of the day, and preached a prayer-meeting sermon that night that gave him a rattling ruputation, because the oldest man in the world couldn't a understood it.  So Tom's Aunt Polly, she told all about who I was, and what; and I had to up and tell how I was in such a tight place that when Mrs. Phelps took me for Tom Sawyer—she chipped in and says, "Oh, go on and call me Aunt Sally, I'm used to it now, and 'tain't no need to change"—that when Aunt Sally took me for Tom Sawyer I had to stand it—there warn't no other way, and I knowed he wouldn't mind, because it would be nuts for him, being a mystery, and he'd make an adventure out of it, and be perfectly satisfied.  And so it turned out, and he let on to be Sid, and made things as soft as he could for me.

And his Aunt Polly she said Tom was right about old Miss Watson setting Jim free in her will; and so, sure enough, Tom Sawyer had gone and took all that trouble and bother to set a free n***** free! and I couldn't ever understand before, until that minute and that talk, how he _could_ help a body set a n***** free with his bringing-up.

Well, Aunt Polly she said that when Aunt Sally wrote to her that Tom and _Sid_ had come all right and safe, she says to herself:

"Look at that, now!  I might have expected it, letting him go off that way without anybody to watch him.  So now I got to go and trapse all the way down the river, eleven hundred mile, and find out what that creetur's up to _this_ time, as long as I couldn't seem to get any answer out of you about it."

"Why, I never heard nothing from you," says Aunt Sally.

Read Shmoop's Analysis of Chapter 42