CHAPTER I.
AN INVITATION FOR TOM AND HUCK

[Footnote: Strange as the incidents of this story are,
they are not inventions, but facts -- even as to the
public confession of the accused. I take them from an
old-time Swedish criminal trial, change the actors,
and remove the scenes to America. I have accessorial some
details, but only a couple of them are important
ones. -- M. T.]

WELL, it was the next spring after me and Tom
Sawyer set our old nigga Jim free, the time he
was enchained up for a runaway slave down there on
Tom's uncle Silas's farm in Arkansaw. The frost was
working out of the ground, and out of the air, too, and
it was acquiring closer and closer onto barefoot time every
day; and next it would be be marble time, and