Meet Tom Sawyer

The extract opens with Aunt Polly calling out for her nephew Tom, who does not answer. Searching the room with her spectacles pushed down her nose — since she only wears them for "style," not for actually seeing through — she checks under the bed with a broom and finds nothing but the cat. Stepping to the door, she shouts for Tom across the garden, only to catch him climbing out of a closet behind her, his hands and mouth smeared with jam. Though Tom claims not to know what the "mess" is, Aunt Polly raises her switch to punish him — until Tom cleverly distracts her by shouting "Look behind you, Aunt!," giving him just enough time to escape over the fence. Rather than staying angry, Aunt Polly ends up laughing to herself, admitting that Tom always seems to know exactly how to outsmart her, and that she can never bring herself to punish her late sister's son as strictly as she probably should.

As punishment for skipping his afternoon of play, Aunt Polly instead resolves to make Tom work extra hard on Saturday. True to form, Tom does skip his chores that day and enjoys himself thoroughly, arriving home only just in time to help — though in practice, his friend Jim ends up doing most of the actual sawing. Tom's quiet, well-behaved half-brother Sid, by contrast, has already finished his own simple task without any fuss, highlighting the contrast between the two boys' characters.

At supper, Aunt Polly tries various cunning, roundabout questions to trick Tom into confessing that he skipped school and went swimming that day, secretly proud of what she believes is clever detective work. Sensing the trap, Tom manages to answer carefully enough to avoid confessing outright, and when Aunt Polly checks that his shirt is dry rather than damp from swimming, she is satisfied — until she suddenly remembers she had sewn his collar shut that morning specifically to check whether he would need to undo it to go swimming. Just as she is about to catch him out, Sid points out that the thread she used was originally white, though the collar is now sewn with black thread — meaning Tom had clearly undone and re-sewn it himself. Before Aunt Polly can respond, Tom bolts from the room, vowing revenge on Sid for tattling. Safely outside, Tom is revealed to have deliberately planned ahead, carrying both black and white thread with him for exactly this kind of trick.

The scene then shifts to Tom walking down the street that evening, happily practising a new bird-like whistle he has just learned. His good mood is interrupted when he encounters a boy he does not recognise — a stranger a little larger than himself, and unusually well-dressed for an ordinary weekday, which makes him an object of great curiosity in the plain, shabby village of St. Petersburg. Struck with envy at the newcomer's fine clothes, Tom finds himself unable to resist stopping and staring, and the two boys begin circling each other warily, each trying to appear tougher than the other.

What begins as boastful taunting — both boys claiming they could "lick" the other, and each inventing an imaginary older brother even bigger and stronger than the other's — soon escalates into a physical confrontation. Tom draws a line in the dust and dares the new boy to cross it, and once he does, the two end up wrestling fiercely in the dirt, neither willing to let go first for fear of losing face. Eventually, Tom manages to gain the upper hand, forcing the stranger to cry out in defeat. The humiliated boy storms off in tears, brushing dust from his once-fine clothes and vowing that Tom will regret this "next time" they meet.