24. The writer of the mini-story wants to tell the readers
________.
A. Two heads
are better than one.
B. No pains,
no gains.
C. Don’t fly
off the handle.
D. The battle is to the brave.
F
Tom appeared on the
sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush. He stopped by the
fence in front of the house where he lived with his aunt Polly. He looked at
it, and all joy left him. The fence was long and high. He put the brush into
the whitewash and moved it along the top of the fence. He repeated the
operation. He felt he could not continue and sat down.
He knew that his friends
would arrive soon with all kinds of interesting plans for the day. They would
walk past him and laugh. They would make jokes about his having to work on a
beautiful summer Saturday. The thought burned him like fire.
He put his hand into his
pockets and took out all that he owned. Perhaps he could find some way to pay
someone to do the whitewashing for him. But there was nothing of value in his
pockets -nothing that could buy even half an hour of freedom. So he put the
bits of toys back into his pockets and gave up the idea.
At this dark and hopeless
moment, a wonderful idea came to him. It filled his mind with a great, bright
light. Calmly he picked up the brush and started again to whitewash.
While Tom was working,
Ben Rogers appeared. Ben was eating an apple as he walked along the street. As
he walked along, he was making noises like the sound of a riverboat. First he
shouted loudly, like a boat captain. Then he said “Ding-Dong-Dong”,
“Ding-Dong-Dong” again and again, like the bell of a riverboat. And he made
other strange noises. When he came close to Tom, he stopped.
Tom went on
whitewashing. He did not look at Ben. Ben stared a moment and then said:
“Hello! I’m going swimming, but you can’t go, can you?”
No answer. Tom moved his
brush carefully along the fence and looked at the result with the eye of an
artist. Ben came nearer. Tom’s mouth watered for the apple, but he kept on
working.
Ben said, “Hello, old
fellow, you’ve got to work, hey?”
Tom turned suddenly and
said, “Why, it’s you, Ben! I wasn’t noticing.”
“Say -I’m going
swimming. Don’t you wish you could? But of course you’d rather work - wouldn’t
you? Of course you would.”
Tom looked at the boy a
bit, and said “What do you call work?”
“Why, isn’t that work?”
Tom went back to his whitewashing, and answered
carelessly.
“Well, maybe it is, and
maybe it isn’t. All I know is, it suits Tom Sawyer.”
“Oh come, now, you don’t
mean to say that you like it?”
The brush continued to
move.
“Like it? Well, I don’t
see why I shouldn’t like it. Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every
day?”
Ben stopped eating his
apple. Tom moved his brush back and forth, stepped back to look at the result,
added a touch here and there, and stepped back again. Ben watched every move
and got more and more interested. Soon he said,
“Say, Tom, let me
whitewash a little.”
Tom thought for a
moment, was about to agree; but he changed his mind.
“No -no -it won’t do,
Ben. You see, Aunt Polly wants this fence to be perfect. It has got to be done
very carefully. I don’t think there is one boy in a thousand, maybe two thousand,
that can do it well enough.”
“No -is that so? Oh
come, now -let me just try. Only just a little.”
“Ben, I’d like to, but
if it isn’t done right, I’m afraid Aunt Polly … ”
“Oh, I’ll be careful.
Now let me try. Say -I’ll give you the core(核心)of my apple.”
“Well, here -No, Ben,
now don’t. I’m afraid …”
“I’ll give you all of
it.”
Tom gave up the brush
with unwillingness on his face, but joy in his heart. And while Ben worked at
the fence in the hot sun, Tom sat under a tree, eating the apple, and planning how
to get more help. There were enough boys. Each one came to laugh, but remained
to whitewash. By the time Ben was tired, Tom sold the next chance to Billy for
a kite; and when Billy was tired, Johnny bought in for a dead rat -and so on,
hour after hour. And when the middle of the afternoon came, Tom had won many
treasures.
And he had not worked.
He had had a nice idle time all the time, with plenty of company －and the fence
had been whitewashed three times. If he hadn’t run out of whitewash, Tom would
have owned everything belonging to his friends.
He had discovered a
great law of human action, namely, that in order to make a man or a boy want a
thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to get.
