THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER - online book

Original Illustrated Version By Mark Twain

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	DISMAL FELICITY.			39
		it; it was too sacred for such con­tact ; and so, presently, when his cousin Mary danced in, all alive with the joy of seeing home again after an age-long visit of one week to the country, he got up and moved in clouds and darkness out at one door as she brought song and sunshine in at the other. He wandered far from the •accus­tomed haunts of boys, and sought desolate places that were in harmony with his spirit. A log raft in the river invited him, and he seated him­self on its outer edge and contem­plated the dreary vastness of the
	stream, wishing, the while, that he could only be drowned, all at once and uncon­sciously, without undergoing the uncom­fortable routine devised by nature. Then he thought of his flower. He got it out, rumpled and wilted, and it mightily in­creased his dismal felicity. He wondered if she would pity him if she knew ? Would she cry, and wish that she had a "right to put her arms around his neck and com­fort him? Or would she turn coldly away like all the hollow world ? This picture brought such an agony of pleasureable suffering that he worked it over and over again in his mind and set it up in new and varied lights, till he wore it threadbare, departed in the darkness.
			At last he rose up sighing and