At the end of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer ( 1875 ), Mark Twain appends a terse note: "So endeth this chronicle. It being strictly a history of a boy, it must stop here; the story could not go much further without becoming the history of a man." The ending is as abrupt as it could be: until its final chapters the text celebrates what Twain calls "the pure unalloyed pleasure" of boyhood, inviting adult readers to immerse themselves once again in the "pattern- restless, noisy. and troublesome" of childhood energy. By the end, however, as Tom's summer adventures draw to a close and he must once again face the socializing injunctions of home, school, and church; as Huckleberry Finn is adopted by the widow Douglas; the boyhood world of St. Petersburg grows increasingly constricted, haunted by the specter of an adult manhood that, as Twain acknowledges in his conclusion, threatens the novel's idyllicism.