Tom considered, was about to consent; but he altered his mind: 'No - no - I reckon it wouldn't hardly do, Ben. You see, Aunt Polly's awful particular about this fence - right here on the street, you know - but if it was the back fence I wouldn't mind and she wouldn't. Yes, she's awful particular about this fence; it's got to be done very careful; I reckon there ain't one boy in a thousand, maybe two thousand, that can do it the way it's got to be done.'"
And if you haven't figured out by now the source of this quote, yours must've been a misspent youth. It is, of course, that moment when Tom Sawyer discovers a great law of human action, without knowing it - namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain (which the female of the species knows instinctively as every married man can attest to).
And what a great business model it turned out to be in the age of the internet: facebook, wikipedia, ebay, and many, many other websites "allow" us - if done very careful - to "whitewash" their websites while they reap the profits without doing anything. Think about it next time.
