ABSTRACT
While reading to my children recently I came across the following passage from Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and I was struck by its applicability to our topic today. Some of you may recall the scene. Tom is displaying to an admiring crowd the tooth he had recently pulled when Huck, not to be outdone, displays an equally enticing novelty: a wood tick that he has been keeping in a small box. Working up to a swap, the two rivals begin a cautious circling ritual:
“Say, what’s that?”
“Nothing but a tick.”
“Where’d you get him?”
“Out in the woods.”
“What’ll you take for him?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to sell him.”
“All right. It’s a mighty small tick anyway.”
“Oh, anybody can run a tick down that don’t belong to them.
I’m satisfied with it. It’s a good enough tick for me.”
“Sho, there’s ticks aplenty. I could have a thousand of ’em if I wanted to.”
“Well, why don’t you? Becuz you know mighty well you can’t. This is a pretty early tick, I reckon. It’s the first one I’ve seen this year.”
“Say, Huck—I’ll give you my tooth for him.”
“Less see it.”
Tom got out a bit of paper and carefully unrolled it. Huckleberry viewed it wistfully. The temptation was very strong. At last he said:
“Is it genuwyne?”
Tom lifted his lip and showed the vacancy.
“Well, all right,” said Huckleberry, “it’s a trade.”
Tom enclosed the tick in the percussion-cap box that had lately been the pinchbug’s prison, and the boys separated, each feeling wealthier than before. 1
