Back at home, Tom shows uncanny insight about events that took place while he was supposedly "away." Aunt Polly questions his good nature, Becky Thatcher rejects and accepts him, and school comes to a resounding close for the summer.

Tom, Joe and Huck leave civilization behind, but notice a search for them. Tom spies on his family back home, but in spite of homesickness, storm, and trouble learning to smoke, the boys stay out until they have a chance to hear their own eulogies.

Witness of a murder makes a heavy burden for Tom and Huck. This brings Tom very low, Aunt Polly tries to cure him, and Tom doses the cat. Rejected in love, Tom turns to "piracy" with Huck and Joe.

Understanding between Becky and Tom is brief, driving Tom to consider life as an outlaw. When he and Huck visit the graveyard at midnight, drawbacks become all too clear.

At church, Tom's mind wanders, and he lets his "pinch bug" out of the box, to wander and make exciting friends. Monday Tom avoids school, fakes illness, talks with the outcast Huck Finn, and confesses. Punishment? To sit next to the admired new girl!

Tom tries for a little justice of his own, changes his affections, leads a small army, is unjustly punished, and wins a Bible by showing more scholarship than he actually has.

Tom tries to get the most out of life as a small boy in a small river town in Missouri before the Civil War, and his Aunt Polly tries to bring him up to responsible respectability, giving him the odious chore of whitewashing their board fence.

Unable to get Bartleby to leave his office, the owner of the law firm moves the office instead. Bartleby remains in the old building until removed by the landlord, and is sent to the Tombs, a Manhattan prison.

A phlegmatic lawyer who gets more business hires an additional copyist, or scrivener, in mid-19th century Manhattan. At first, work goes well, but Bartleby's quirks grow, upsetting the lawyer and his temperamental staff.

Returning from the Inner Station, Marlow falls ill after Kurtz dies. Recovering, he is compelled to carry Kurtz's writings back to Europe, and to bring sympathy to his bereft fiancee, trying hard not to speak ill of the dead.