I read some of "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer"

Catalyzed by a scheduled getaway with mom and sister to Hannibal, MO, Mark Twain's (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) boyhood town, this week, I'm reading the Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the writing is blowing me away. I want to buy 9 copies for the young people in my life. The writing so entertains my mind and triggers images of the author contemplating each paragraph for a whole morning at his desk and how he could most creatively and humorously, with metaphors and adult-life reference points, present the mood and energy of seemingly simple boyhood pleasures and antics. Here he talks about Tom's new whistling skill:

[His] new interest was a valued novelty in whistling, which he had just acquired from a Negro, and he was suffering to practise it undisturbed. It consisted in a peculiar bird-like turn, a sort of liquid warble, produced by touching the tongue to the roof of the mouth at short intervals in the midst of the music. The reader probably remembers how to do it if he has ever been a boy. Diligence and attention soon gave him the knack of it, and he strode down the street with his mouth full of harmony and his soul full of gratitude. He felt much as an astronomer feels who has discovered a new planet. No doubt as far as strong, deep, unalloyed pleasure is concerned, th advantage was with the boy, not the astronomer.