"Mark Twain. Tom Sawyer Abroad (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

your sand. They call it confiscating, but that don't deceive nobody, it's
just hogging, and that's all it is. Now if we try to carry this sand home
the way we're pointed now, we got to climb fences till we git tired-just
frontier after frontier-Egypt, Arabia, Hindostan, and so on, and they'll
all whack on a duty, and so you see, easy enough, we CAN'T go THAT road."
"Why, Tom," I says, "we can sail right over their old frontiers; how
are THEY going to stop us?"
He looked sorrowful at me, and says, very grave:
"Huck Finn, do you think that would be honest?"
I hate them kind of interruptions. I never said nothing, and he went on:
"Well, we're shut off the other way, too. If we go back the way we've
come, there's the New York custom-house, and that is worse than all of
them others put together, on account of the kind of cargo we've got."
"Why?"
"Well, they can't raise Sahara sand in America, of course, and when
they can't raise a thing there, the duty is fourteen hundred thousand per
cent. on it if you try to fetch it in from where they do raise it."
"There ain't no sense in that, Tom Sawyer."
"Who said there WAS? What do you talk to me like that for, Huck Finn?
You wait till I say a thing's got sense in it before you go to accusing me
of saying it."
"All right, consider me crying about it, and sorry. Go on."
Jim says:
"Mars Tom, do dey jam dat duty onto everything we can't raise in
America, en don't make no 'stinction 'twix' anything?"
"Yes, that's what they do."
"Mars Tom, ain't de blessin' o' de Lord de mos' valuable thing dey is?"
"Yes, it is."
"Don't de preacher stan' up in de pulpit en call it down on de people?"
"Yes."
"Whah do it come from?"
"From heaven."
"Yassir! you's jes' right, 'deed you is, honey-it come from heaven, en
dat's a foreign country. NOW, den! do dey put a tax on dat blessin'?"
"No, they don't."
"Course dey don't; en so it stan' to reason dat you's mistaken, Mars
Tom. Dey wouldn't put de tax on po' truck like san', dat everybody ain't
'bleeged to have, en leave it off'n de bes' thing dey is, which nobody
can't git along widout."
Tom Sawyer was stumped; he see Jim had got him where he couldn't budge.
He tried to wiggle out by saying they had FORGOT to put on that tax, but
they'd be sure to remember about it, next session of Congress, and then
they'd put it on, but that was a poor lame come-off, and he knowed it. He
said there warn't nothing foreign that warn't taxed but just that one, and
so they couldn't be consistent without taxing it, and to be consistent was
the first law of politics. So he stuck to it that they'd left it out
unintentional and would be certain to do their best to fix it before they
got caught and laughed at.
But I didn't feel no more interest in such things, as long as we
couldn't git our sand through, and it made me low-spirited, and Jim the