Ain't That Work?

Jacob enjoying the second day of summer.

“What do you call work?”

“Why, ain’t that work?”

Tom resumed his whitewashing, and answered carelessly:

“Well, maybe it is, and maybe it ain’t. All I know it suits Tom Sawyer.”

“Oh, come now, you don’t mean to let on that you like it?”

The brush continued to move.

“Like it? Well, I don’t see why I oughtn’t to like it. Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?”

From The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain,
written in Hartford, CT