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Practice and improve writing style. Write like Mark Twain

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I opened my eyes and looked around, trying to make out where I was. It was after sun-up, and I had been sound asleep. Pap was standing over me looking sour and sick, too. He says:

 

It was kind of lazy and jolly, laying off comfortable all day, smoking and fishing, and no books nor study. Two months or more run along, and my clothes got to be all rags and dirt, and I didn’t see how I’d ever got to like it so well at the widow’s, where you had to wash, and eat on a plate, and comb up, and go to bed and get up regular, and be forever bothering over a book, and have old Miss Watson pecking at you all the time. I didn’t want to go back no more. I had stopped cussing, because the widow didn’t like it; but now I took to it again because pap hadn’t no objections. It was pretty good times up in the woods there, take it all around.

 

But they ducked their heads, and put their fingers in their mouths, and hid behind her. So she run on:

 

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:

 

It jolted her up like everything, of course; but I was over the shoal water now, so I went right along, her eyes a-blazing higher and higher all the time, and told her every blame thing, from where we first struck that young fool going up to the steamboat, clear through to where she flung herself on to the king’s breast at the front door and he kissed her sixteen or seventeen times—and then up she jumps, with her face afire like sunset, and says:

 

“Here! You’re a watchman, ain’t you! All right, though—nothing’s happened.”

 

“Now, Huck, where we’re a-standing you could touch that hole I got out of with a fishing-pole. See if you can find it.”

 

“Tom, it don’t make no difference. I ain’t everybody, and I can’t stand it. It’s awful to be tied up so. And grub comes too easy—I don’t take no interest in vittles, that way. I got to ask to go a-fishing; I got to ask to go in a-swimming—dern’d if I hain’t got to ask to do everything. Well, I’d got to talk so nice it wasn’t no comfort—I’d got to go up in the attic and rip out awhile, every day, to git a taste in my mouth, or I’d a died, Tom. The widder wouldn’t let me smoke; she wouldn’t let me yell, she wouldn’t let me gape, nor stretch, nor scratch, before folks—” [Then with a spasm of special irritation and injury]—“And dad fetch it, she prayed all the time! I never see such a woman! I had to shove, Tom—I just had to. And besides, that school’s going to open, and I’d a had to go to it—well, I wouldn’t stand that, Tom. Looky-here, Tom, being rich ain’t what it’s cracked up to be. It’s just worry and worry, and sweat and sweat, and a-wishing you was dead all the time. Now these clothes suits me, and this bar’l suits me, and I ain’t ever going to shake ’em any more. Tom, I wouldn’t ever got into all this trouble if it hadn’t ’a’ ben for that money; now you just take my sheer of it along with your’n, and gimme a ten-center sometimes—not many times, becuz I don’t give a dern for a thing ’thout it’s tollable hard to git—and you go and beg off for me with the widder.”

 

“Don’t ask for it unless you want it, Peter.”

 

“Aunt Polly, it seemed mortified, and it hurt so I never minded my tooth at all.”

 

So saying, he took the pen, and set himself to work.  Hendon contemplated him lovingly a while, then said to himself—

 

“I am full loth to word the thing that is in my mind, and thou so near to him in blood, my lord.  But craving pardon if I do offend, seemeth it not strange that madness could so change his port and manner?—not but that his port and speech are princely still, but that they differ, in one unweighty trifle or another, from what his custom was aforetime.  Seemeth it not strange that madness should filch from his memory his father’s very lineaments; the customs and observances that are his due from such as be about him; and, leaving him his Latin, strip him of his Greek and French?  My lord, be not offended, but ease my mind of its disquiet and receive my grateful thanks.  It haunteth me, his saying he was not the prince, and so—”

 

But he was to have no such luck.  Hugo crept behind the woman, snatched the package, and came running back, wrapping it in an old piece of blanket which he carried on his arm.  The hue and cry was raised in a moment, by the woman, who knew her loss by the lightening of her burden, although she had not seen the pilfering done.  Hugo thrust the bundle into the King’s hands without halting, saying—

 

He was ‘magnificently habited in a doublet of white satin, with a front-piece of purple cloth-of-tissue, powdered with diamonds, and edged with ermine.  Over this he wore a mantle of white cloth-of-gold, pounced with the triple-feathered crest, lined with blue satin, set with pearls and precious stones, and fastened with a clasp of brilliants.  About his neck hung the order of the Garter, and several princely foreign orders;’ and wherever light fell upon him jewels responded with a blinding flash.  O Tom Canty, born in a hovel, bred in the gutters of London, familiar with rags and dirt and misery, what a spectacle is this!

 

“Oh, my liege, what words are these?  I, the humblest of thy servants, presume to teach thee?”

 

 

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