Amor

This except from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer shows that Young love can be a humorous experience.
One of reasons why Tom´s mind had drifted away from is secret troubles was that it had found a new and weighty matter to interest itself about. Becky Thatcher had stopped coming to school. Tom had struggled whit his pride a few days, and tried to “whistle her down the wind” but failed. He began tofind himself hanging around her father´s house, night, and feeling very miserable. She was ill. What if she should die! There was distraction in the thought. He no longer took an interest in war, not even in piracy. The charm of life was gone; there was nothing but dreariness left. He put his hoop away, and his bat; there was no joy in them any more. His aunt was concerned. She began to try allmanner of remedies on him. She was one of those people who are infatuated with patent medicines and all newfangled methods of producing health or mending it. She was a constant experimenter in these things. When something fresh in this line came out she was in a fever, right away, to try it, not on herself, for she was never ailing, but on anybody else that came handy. She was a subscriber for allthe “Health” periodicals, and the solemn ignorance they were inflated with was breath to her nostrils. All the “rot” they contained about ventilation, and how to go to bed, and how to get up, and what to eat, and what to drink, and how much exercise to take, and what frame of mind to keep oneself in, and what sort of clothing to wear, was all gospel to her; and she never observed that her healthjournals of the current month customarily upset everything they had recommended the month before. She was a simplehearted and honest as the day was long, and so she was an easy victim. She gathered together her quack periodicals and her quack medicines, and thus armed with death, went about on her pale horse, metaphorically speaking. But she never suspected that she was not an angel of healing indisguise, to the suffering neighbors.
The water treatment was new, now, and Tom´s low condition was a windfall to her. She had him out at daylight every morning, stood him up in the woodshed, and drowned him with a deluge of cold water; then she scrubbed him down with a towel like a file, and so brought him to; then she rolled him up in a wet sheet and put him away under blankets till she sweatedhis soul clean and “the yellow stains of it came through his pores” --as Tom said
Yet notwithstanding all this, the boy grew more and more melancholy and pale and dejected. She added hot baths, sitz baths, shower baths, and plunges. The boy remained as dismal as a hearse. She began to assist the water with a slim oatmeal diet and blister as a hearse. She calculated his capacity as she would a jug´sand filled him up every day with quack cure-alls.
Tom had become indifferent to persecution by this time. This phase filled the old lady´s heart with consternation. This indifference must be broken up at any cost. Now she heard of Pain Killer for the first time. She ordered a lot at once. She tasted it and was filled with gratitude. It was simply fire in a liquid form. She dropped the watertreatment and everything else and pinned her faith to Pain Killer. She gave Tom a teaspoonful and watched with the deepest anxiety for the result. Her troubles were instantly at rest, her soul at peace again; for the “indifference” was broken up. They boy could not have shown a wilder, heartier interest if she had built a fire under him.
Tom felt that it was time to wake up; this sort of life mightbe romantic enough, in his blighted condition, but it was getting to have too little sentiment and too much distracting variety about it. So he thought over various plans for relief and finally hit upon that of professing to be fond Pain Killer. He asked for it so often that he became a nuisance, and his aunt ended by telling him to help himself and quit brothering her. But since it was Tom, she...