Les Aventures de Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

Shortly after Becky spurns Tom, he accompanies Huckleberry Finn, a vagrant boy whom all the other boys admire, to a graveyard at midnight to perform a superstitious ritual intended to heal warts. Their romance soon collapses when she discovers that Tom was engaged to another schoolgirl, Amy Lawrence. Tom pursues Becky, eventually persuading her to get engaged by kissing her.

Tom wins the admiration of Judge Thatcher in the church by obtaining the Bible as a prize, but reveals his ignorance when he is unable to answer basic questions about Scripture. Tom falls in love with a girl named Becky Thatcher, who is new in town and the daughter of a prominent judge. He collects enough tickets to earn a prized Bible from the teacher, despite being one of the worst students in the class and knowing almost nothing of Scripture, eliciting envy from the students and a mixture of pride and shock from the adults. Later, Tom trades the trinkets with students in his Sunday school class for tickets, given out for memorizing verses of Scripture. Tom cleverly persuades several neighborhood children to trade him small trinkets and treasures for the 'privilege' of doing his tedious work, using reverse psychology to convince them of its enjoyable nature. When Aunt Polly catches him sneaking home late on a Friday evening and discovers that he has been in a fight, she makes him whitewash her fence the next day as punishment. A fun-loving boy, he frequently skips school to play or go swimming. Petersburg, Missouri, sometime in the 1840s. Tom Sawyer is an orphan who lives with his Aunt Polly and his half-brother Sid in the town of St. Illustration from the 1876 edition by artist True Williams.

Les Aventures de Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain