WELL, it was the next spring after me and Tom Sawyer set our old nigger Jim free, the time he was chained 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 getting closer and closer onto barefoot time every day; and next it would be marble time, and next mumbletypeg, and next tops and hoops, and next kites, and then right away it would be summer and going in a-swimming. It just makes a boy homesick to look ahead like that and see how far off summer is. Yes, and it sets him to sighing and saddening around, and there's something the matter with him, he don't know what. But anyway, he gets out by himself and mopes and thinks; and mostly he hunts for a lonesome place high up on the hill in the edge of the woods, and sets there and looks away off on the big Mississippi down there a-reaching miles and miles around the points where the timber looks smoky and dim it's so far off and still, and everything's so solemn it seems like everybody you've loved is dead and gone, and you 'most wish you was dead and gone too, and done with it all.
새뮤얼 랭혼 클레먼스(Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835년 11월 30일 ~ 1910년 4월 21일)는 마크 트웨인(Mark Twain)이라는 필명으로 더욱 유명한 미국의 소설가이다. 주요 작품으로는 미시시피 강 유역을 배경으로 개구쟁이 소년인 톰 소여와 허클베리 핀의 모험을 그린 동화 《톰소여의 모험》이 있다.