'0AHVH8I1-J*' AWEUNIVERS/A 'c/Advaaii-i^ ^lOSANCElfr^ ^HlBRARYQc ^TiuoKvso^ ^/saaMNamv 1 ^EUN(VER% 2z v^VOSANCEl^ %iUDNYS0# "%3AINn3\\^ ^tllBRARYQ^ ^ ^tUBRARY^ .^EUNIVERS/a ^OFCAUFO^ ^OFCALIFO/?^ ^WEUNIVERJ/a *%»»•# %mit# ^dnv-sov^ s ^UEINIVERS/a ^lOSANGElfr. ^UIBRARYQc* .#UBRARYQ ^HDNVSOV^ %«3AINn-3^ ^WMITCHO 5 ^ ^fOJIlYD-iO 1 ^EUNIVER% A^lOSANGElfx^ ^OKAUFO/?^ ^OF-CAllFOMj ^wsoi^ ^aihainw^ ^atom^ 7 ^Aavaains mm-w '0AavaaiH*> ^honvsoi^ '^ainrwv MNIVERS/^. ^aOSANGEtfj^ ^UIBRARYQ^ ^UIBRARYQr MNVSO^ ^/.MAINIHW^ ^OJITYDJO^ ^/OJIIVDJO^ H'NIVER% ^lOSASGFlfr.^ ^OFCAllFOfy^ ^OFCAIIFO/?^ uonvsov^ ^ajAiNii^ y - %H3AINa3\\V >> ^lOSANGEl^ r±~ CC AavaaiH^ 7 ^Awaan# ^uowscn^ %™ih\\v s itl'NIYER% v>;lOSANCEl^ v ^UIBRARYQ^ ^UIBRAJJYQ^ raw-so^ %m\m-}^ ^/odiwDJO^ \oi\m-i^ \EUNIVER% ^lOSANCFlfj-^. r-Tl ^OFCAEIFO% ^OFCMIFO/?^ TOM SAWYER ABROAD MARK TWAIN'S WORKS. Crown 8vo. cloth extra, 7s. dd. each. THE CHOICE WORKS OF MARK TWAIN. Revised and Corrected throughout by the Author. With Life, Portrait, and numerous Illustrations. ROUGHING IT, AND THE INNOCENTS AT HOME. With 200 Illustrations by F. A. Fraser. MARK TWAIN'S LIBRARY OF HUMOUR. With 197 Illustrations. Crown 8vo. cloth extra (Illustrated), ys. 6./. each ; post 8vc. Illustrated boards, 2s. each. THE INNOCENTS ABROAD; or, The New Piix.rim's Progress. With 234 Illustrations. (The Two-Shilling Edition is entitled Mark Twain's Pleasure Trip.) THE GILDED AGE. By Mark Twain and C. D. Warm k. With 212 Illustrations. THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER. With 11 1 Illustrations. A TRAMP ABROAD. With 314 Illustrations, THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER. With 190 lllustra- LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI. With 300 Illustrations. THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN. With 174 Illustrations by E. W. Kemhle. A YANKEE AT THE COURT OF KING ARTHUR. With 220 Illustrations by Dan Beard. Post 8vo. illustrated boards, 2s. each. THE STOLEN WHITE ELEPHANT. MARK TWAIN'S SKETCHES. Crown 8vo. cloth extra, y. (xi. each. THE AMERICAN CLAIMANT. With 81 Illustrations by Hal Hurst, &c. THE ;£i,ooo,coo BANK-NOTE, and other New Stories. TOM SAWYER ABROAD. With 26 Illustrations by Dan Beard. PUDD'NHEAD WILSON. With a Portrait of the Author, and Illustrations by Louis I.OEB. !-!>>//. 1894. London: CHATTO & WINDUS, 214 Piccadilly, W. WE CATCHED A LOT OF THE NICER KISH TOO l'Vi:i: [p. 127 TOM SAWYER ABROAD MARK TWAIN (SAMUEL L. CLEMENS) WITH 26 ILLUSTRATIONS BV DAN. BEARD ^r bonbon CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY 1894 PKINTKD 11V SPOTTI^WOODB AS.. CO., NMVSTKr.ET SQUARE ?s Ai LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS TAGE ' We catched a Lot of the nicest Fish you ever see ' Frontispiece ' We went out in the Woods on the Hill, and Tom told rs what it was. It was a Crcsade ' . . . . 12 ' He would have raised a Couple of Thousand Knights, AND BRUSHED THE WHOLE PaYNIM OUTFIT INTO THE SEA ' 18 ' He said he would sail his Balloon around the Globe, just to show what he could do ' 27 4 And here was Night coming on ' 29 ' The Professor said he would keep up this Hundred- mile Gait till To-morrow Afternoon, and then he'd land in London ' 51 '"YOU WANT TO LEAVE ME. Don't TRY TO DENY IT '" ' . 52 "The Thunder boomed, and the Lightning glared, and the Wind sung and screamed in the Rigging ' . . 57 ' " Run ! run fo' yo' Life ! " ' 69 'They were jumping up at the Ladder, and snapping and snarling at each other' 72 'we swooped down, now, all of a sudden, and stopped about a hundred yards over their heads ' . . 81 viii LIST OF ILLUSTRATlO.XS The last Max to go snatched cp a Chili, am. cabbies IT OFF IX FKOXT OF HIM OX HIS HoKSE ' S;{ ' Wk comk A-wrazzma down and hade a Swoop, and knocked him out of the Saddle, Child and all ' . . . 85 • " Whbbe's toub Max now ? " ' 90 •"Am. whbbe's joub Ratlboad, 'lonobide of a Flea?'". 99 ' " That Flea would be Pbestdent of the United Stati s, axd you couldn't piievent it " ' "D THE LIGHTXESG GLARED, AND THE WEND SUNG A>D SCREAMED Ei THE BIGGESG ' 58 TOM SAWYER ABROAD wide desert of waves pitching and tossing, through a kind of veil of rain. A storm like that is the loveliest thing there is, but it ain't at its best when you are up in the sky and lost, and it's wet and lonesome, and there's just been a death in the family. We set there huddled up in the bow, and talked low about the poor professor, and everybody was sorry for him, and sorry the world had made fun of him, and treated him so harsh, when he was doing the best he could and hadn't a friend nor nobody to encourage him and keep him from brooding his miud away and going deranged. There was plenty of clothes and blankets and every- thing at the other end, but we thought we'd ruther take the rain than go meddling back there. You see, it would seem so crawly to be where it was warm yet, as you might say, from a dead man. Jim said he would soak till he was mush before he would go there and maybe run up against that ghost betwixt the flashes. He said it always mado him sick to see a ghost, and he'd ruther die than feel of one. TOM SAWYER ABROAD 59 CHAPTER V We tried to make some plans, but we couldn't come to no agreement. Me and Jim was for turning around and going back home, but Tom allowed that by the time daylight come, so we could see our way, we would be so far towards England that we might as well go there and come back in a ship and have the glory of saying we done it. About midnight the storm quit and the moon come out and lit up the ocean, and then we begun to feel comfortable and drowsy ; so we stretched out on the lockers and went to sleep, and never woke up again till sun-up. The sea was sparkling like di'monds, and it was nice weather, and pretty soon our things was all dry again. We went aft to find some breakfast, and the first thing we noticed was that there was a dim 60 TOM SAWYER ABROAD light burning in a compass back there under a hood. Then Tom was disturbed. He says : ' You know what that means easy enough. It means that somebody has got to stay on watch and steer this thing the same as he would a ship, or she'll wander around and go wherever the wind wants her to.' 1 Well,' I says, ' what's she been doing since — er — since we had the accident ? ' ' Wandering,' he says, kind of troubled — ' wan- dering, without any doubt. She's in a wind, now, that's blowing her south of east. We don't know how long that's been going on, either.' So then he p'inted her east, and said he would hold her there, whilst we rousted out the breakfast. The professor had laid in everything a body could want : he couldn't 'a' been better fixed. There wasn't no milk for the coffee, but there was water and everything else you could want, and a charcoal stove and the fixings for it, and pipes and cigars and matches; and wine and liquor, which warn't in our line ; and books and maps and charts, and an accordion ; and furs and blankets, and no end of TOM SAWYER ABROAD 6r rubbish, like glass beads and brass jewellery, which Tom said was a sure sign that he had an idea of visiting around amongst savages. There was money, too. Yes, the professor was well enough fixed. After breakfast Tom learned me and Jim how to steer, and divided all of us up into four-hour watches, turn and turn about ; and when his watch was out I took his place, and he got out the professor's papers and pens, and wrote a letter home to his aunt Polly telling her everything that had happened to us, and dated it 'In the Welkin, approaching England,' and folded it together and stuck it fast with a red wafer, and directed it, and wrote above the direction in big writing, ' From Tom Satcyer the Erronort,' and said it would sweat old Nat Parsons the postmaster when it come along in the mail. I says : 1 Tom Sawyer, this ain't no welkin : it's a balloon.' ' Well, now, who said it was a welkin, smarty ? ' ' You've wrote it on the letter, anyway.' 62 TOM SAWYER ABROAD ' What of it ? That don't mean that the bal- loon's the welkin.' ' Oh, I thought it did. Well, then, what is a welkin ? ' I see in a minute he was stuck. He raked and scraped around in his mind, but he couldn't find nothing, so he had to say : ' / don't know, and nobody don't know. It's just a word. And it's a mighty good word too. There ain't many that lays over it. I don't believe there's any that does.' • Shucks,' I says ; ' but what does it mean ? — that's the p'int.' ' / don't know what it means, I tell you. It's a word that people uses for — for — well, it's ornamen- tal. They don't put ruffles on a shirt to help keep a person warm, do they ? ' 1 Course they don't.' ' But they put them on, don't they ? ' ' Yes.' 1 All right, then ; that letter I wrote is a shirt, and the welkin's the ruffle on it.' TOM SAWYER ABROAD 63 I judged that that would gravel Jim, and it did. He says : ' Now, Mars Tom, it ain't no use to talk like dat, en moreover it's sinful. You know's a letter ain't no shirt, en dey ain't no ruffles on it nuther. Dey ain't no place to put 'em on, you can't put 'em on, en dey wouldn't stay on ef you did.' ' Oh, do shut up, and wait till something's started that you know something about.' ' Why, Mars Tom, sholy you don't mean to say I don't know about shirts, when goodness knows I's toted home de washin' ever sence ' I I tell you this hasn't got anything to do with shirts. I only ' 1 Why, Mars Tom ! You said yo' own self dat a letter ' 1 Do you want to drive me crazy ? Keep still ! I only used it as a metaphor.' That word kind of bricked us up for a minute. Then Jim says, ruther timid, because he see Tom was getting pretty tetchy : ' Mars Tom, what is a metaphor ? ' 'A metaphor's a— well, it's a— a metaphor's 64 TOM SAWYER ABROAD an illustration.' He see that that didn't git home ; so he tried again. ' When I say birds of a feather flocks together, it's a metaphorical way of saying ' • But dey don't, Mars Tom. No, sir ; 'deed dey don't. Dey ain't no feathers dat's more alike den a bluebird's en a jaybird's, but ef you waits till you catches dem birds a flockin' together, you'll — ' ' Oh, give us a rest. You can't get the simplest little thing through your thick skull. Now, don't bother me any more.' Jim was satisfied to stop. He was dreadful pleased with himself for catching Tom out. The minute Tom begun to talk about birds I judged he was a goner, because Jim knowed more about birds than both of us put together. You see, he had killed hundreds and hundreds of them, and that's the way to find out about birds. That's the way the people does that writes books about birds, and loves them so that they'll go hungry and tired and take any amount of trouble to find a new bird and kill it. Their name is ornithologers, and I could 'a' been an ornithologer myself, because I always loved birds and creatures ; and I started TOM SAWYER ABROAD 65 out to learn how to be one, and I see a bird setting on a dead limb of a high tree, singing, with his head tilted back and his mouth open, and before I thought I fired, and his song stopped and he fell straight down from the limb, all limp like a rag, and I run and picked him up, and he was dead, and his body was warm in my hand, and his head rolled about, this way and that, like his neck was broke, and there was a white skin over his eyes, and one little drop of blood on the side of his head, and laws ! I couldn't see nothing more for the tears ; and I hain't ever murdered no creature since that warn't doing me no harm, and I ain't going to. But I was aggravated about that welkin. I wanted to know. I got the subject up again, and then Tom explained the best he could. He said when a person made a big speech the newspapers said the shouts of the people made the welkin ring. He said they always said that, but none of them ever told what it was, so he allowed it just meant outdoors and up high. Well, that seemed sensible enough, so I was satisfied, and said so. That F 66 TOM SAWYER ABROAD pleased Tom and put Lira in a good humour again, and he says : 1 Well, it's all right, then, and we'll let bygones be bygones. I don't know for certain what a welkin is, but when we land in London we'll make it ring } anyway, and don't you forget it.' He said an erronort was a person who sailed around in balloons ; and said it was a mighty sight finer to be Tom Sawyer the Erronort than to be Tom Sawyer the Traveller, and would be heard of all around the world, if we pulled through all right, and so be wouldn't give shucks to be a traveller now. Towards the middle of the afternoon we got everything ready to land, and we felt pretty good, too, and proud ; and we kept watching with the glasses, like C'lumbus discovering America. But we couldn't see nothing but ocean. The afternoon wasted out and the sun shut down, and still there warn't no land anywheres. We wondered what was the matter, but reckoned it would come out all right, so we went on steering east, but went up on a higher level so we wouldn't hit any steeples or mountains in the dark. TOM SAWYER ABROAD 67 It was my watch till midnight, and then it was Jim's ; but Tom stayed up, because he said ship captains done that when they was making the land, and didn't stand no regular watch. Well, when daylight come, Jim give a shetit; and we jumped up and looked over, and there was the land, sure enough ; land all around, as far as you could see, and perfectly level and yaller. We didn't know how long we had been over it. There warn't no trees, nor hills, nor rocks, nor towns, and Tom and Jim had took it for the sea. They took it for the sea in a dead cam ; but we was so high up, any- way, that if it had been the sea and rough, it would a' looked smooth, all the same, in the night that way. We was all in a powerful excitement, now, and grabbed the glasses and hunted everywheres for London, but couldn't find hide nor hair of it, nor any other settlement. Nor any sign of a lake or a river either. Tom was clean beat. He said it warn't his notion of England — he thought England looked like America, and always had that idea. So he said we better have breakfast, and then drop F 2 63 TOM SAWYER ABROAD down and inquire the quickest way to London. We cut the breakfast pretty short, we was so impatient. As we slanted along down, the weather begun to moderate, and pretty soon we shed our furs. But it kept on moderating, and in a precious little while it was 'most too moderate. Why, the sweat begun to fairly bile out of us. We was close down, now, and just blistering ! We settled down to within thirty foot of the land. That is, it was land if sand is land ; for this wasn't anything but pure sand. Tom and me dumb down the ladder and took a run to stretch our legs, and it felt amazing good ; that is, the stretching did, but the sand scorched our feet like hot embers. Next, we see somebody coming, and started to meet him ; but we heard Jim shout, and looked around, and he was fairly dancing, and making signs, and yelling. We couldn't make out what he said, but we was scared, anyway, and begun to heel it back to the balloon. When we got close enough, we understood the words, and they made me sick : 1 Eun ! run fo' yo' life ! Hit's a lion — I kin see him thoo de glass ! Run, boys ! do please heel it TOM SAWYER ABROAD 69 de bes' you kin ! He's busted outen de menagerie, en dey ain't nobody to stop him ! ' It made Tom fly, but it took the stiffening all out of my legs. I could only just gasp along the BUN ! BUN FO' YO' LIFE ! way you do in a dream when there's a ghost a-gain- ing on you. Tom got to the ladder and shinned up it a piece and waited for me ; and as soon as I got a footholt on it he shouted to Jim to soar away. But Jim had 70 TOM SAWYER ABROAD clean lost his head, and said he had forgot how. So Tom shinned along up and told me to follow ; but the lion was arriving, fetching a most gashly roar with every lope, and my legs shook so I dasn't try to take one of them out of the rounds for fear the other one would give way under me. But Tom was aboard by this time, and he started the balloon up a little, and stopped it again as soon as the end of the ladder was ten or twelve foot above ground. And there was the lion, a-rip- ping around under me, and roaring, and springing up in the air at the ladder, and only missing it about a quarter of an inch, it seemed to me. It was deli- cious to be out of his reach— perfectly delicious — and made me feel good and thankful all up one side ; but I was hanging there helpless, and couldn't climb, and that made me feel perfectly wretched and miserable all down the other. It is 'most seldom that a person feels so mixed, like that ; and it is not to be recommended, either. Tom asked me what he better do, but I didn't know. He asked me if I could hold on whilst he sailed away to a safe place and left the lion behind; TOM SAWYER ABROAD 71 I said I could if he didn't go no higher than he was now, but if he went higher I would lose my head and fall, sure. So he said, ' Take a good grip ! ' and he started. 1 Don't go so fast/ I shouted ; ' it makes my head swim.' He had started like a lightning express. He slowed down, and we glided over the sand slower, but still in a kind of sickening way, for it is uncom- fortable to see things gliding and sliding under you like that and not a sound. But pretty soon there was plenty of sound, for the lion was catching up. His noise fetched others. You could see them coming on the lope from every direction, and pretty soon there was a couple of dozen of them under me skipping up at the ladder and snarling and snapping at each other ; and so we went skimming along over the sand, and these fellers doing what they could to help us to not for- git the occasion ; and then some tigers come, with- out an invite, and they started a regular riot down there. We see this plan was a mistake. We couldn't 7? TOM SAWYER ABROAD THEY WERE JUMPING CP AT THE LADDER, AND SNAPPING AND SNARLING AT EACH OTHER ' TOM SAWYER ABROAD 73 ever git away from them at this gait, and I couldn't hold on for ever. So Tom took a think and struck another idea. That was to kill a lion with the pepper-box revolver, and then sail away while the others stopped to fight over the carcase. So he stopped the balloon still, and done it, and then we sailed off while the fuss was going on, and come down a quarter of a mile off, and they helped me aboard ; but by the time we was out of reach again that gang was on hand once more. And when they see we was really gone and they couldn't get us, they sat down on their hams and looked up at us so kind of disappointed that it was as much as a person could do not to see their side of the matter. 74 TOM SAWYER ABROAD CHAPTER VI I was so weak that the only thing I wanted was a chance to lay down, so I made straight for my locker-bunk and stretched myself out there. But a body couldn't git back his strength in no such oven as that, so Tom give the command to soar, and Jim started her aloft. And, mind you, it was a considerable strain on that balloon to lift the fleas, and reminded Tom of Mary had a little lamb, its fleas was white as snow. But these wasn't ; these was the dark-complected kind— the kind that's always hungry and ain't particular, and will eat pie when they can't git Christian. Wherever there's sand, you are going to find that bird ; and the more sand, the bigger the flock. Here it was all sand, and the result was according. I never see such a turn-out. We had to go up a mile before we struck com- TOM SAWYER ABROAD 75 fortable weather; and we had to go up another mile before we got rid of them creturs ; but when they begun to freeze they skipped overboard. Then we come down a mile again, where it was breezy and pleasant and just right, and pretty soon I was all straight again. Tom had been setting quiet and thinking ; but now he jumps up and says : ' I bet you a thousand to one I know where we are. We're in the Great Sahara, as sure as guns ! ' He was so excited he couldn't hold still. But I wasn't ; I says : 'Well, then, where's the Great Sahara? In England, or in Scotland ? ' 1 Tain't in either : it's in Africa.' Jim's eyes bugged out, and he begun to stare down with no end of interest, because that was where his originals come from ; but I didn't more than half believe it. I couldn't, you know; it seemed too awful far away for us to have travelled. But Tom was full of his discovery, as he called 76 TOM SAWYER ABROAD it, and said the lions and the sand meant the Great Desert, sure. He said he could 'a' found out, before we sighted land, that we was crowding the land somewheres, if he had thought of one thing and when we asked him what, he said : ' These clocks. They're chronometers. You always read about them in sea-voyages. One of them is keeping Grinnage time, and the other one is keeping St. Louis time, like my watch. When we left St. Louis, it was four in the afternoon by my watch and this clock, and it was ten at night by this Grinnage clock. Well, at this time of the year the sun sets about seven o'clock. Now, I noticed the time yesterday evening when the sun went down, and it was half past five o'clock by the Grinnage clock, and half past eleven a.m. by my watch and the other clock. You see, the sun rose and set by my watch in St. Louis, and the Grinnage clock was six hours fast ; but we've come so far east that it comes within less than an hour and a half of setting by the Grinnage clock now, and I'm away out — more than four hours and a half out. You see, that meant that we was closing TOM SAWYER ABROAD 77 up on the longitude of Ireland, and would strike it before long if we was p'inted right — wEich we wasn't. No, sir ; we've been a-wandering — wander- ing 'way down south of east — and it's my opinion we are in Africa. Look at this map. You see how the shoulder of Africa sticks out to the west. Think how fast we've travelled; if we had gone straight east we would be long past England by this time. You watch for noon, all of you, and we'll stand up, and when we can't cast a shadow we'll find that this Grinnage clock is coming mighty close to marking twelve. Yes, sir ; / think we're in Africa ; and it's just bully.' Jim was gazing down with the glass. He shook his head and says : 1 Mars Tom, I reckon dey's a mistake somers. I hain't seen no niggers yit.' 1 That's nothing— they don't live in the desert. What is that, 'way off yonder ? Gimme a glass.' He took a long look, and said it was like a black string stretched across the sand, but Le couldn't guess what it was. 'Well,' I says, 'I reckon ma} be you've got a 78 TOM SAWYER ABROAD chance now to find out whereabouts this balloon is, because as like as not that is one of these lines here, that's on the map, that you call meridians of longi- tude, and we can drop down and look at its number, and ' 1 Oh, shucks, Huck Finn ! I never see such a lunkhead as you. Did you s'pose there's meridians of longitude on the earth ? ' ' Tom Sawyer, they're set down on the map, and you know it perfectly well, and here they are, and you can see for yourself.' ' Of course they're on the map, but that's nothing ; there ain't any on the ground,' ' Tom, do you know that to be so ? ' 1 Certainly I do.' ' Well then, that map's a liar again. I never see such a liar as that map.' Hi iired up at that, and I was ready for him, and Jim was warming up his opinion too, and the next minute we'd 'a' broke loose on another argu- ment, if Tom hadn't dropped the glass and begun to clap his hands like a maniac and sing out : 1 Camels ! — camels ! ' TOM SAWYER ABROAD 79 So I grabbed a glass, and Jim too, and took a look, but I was disappointed, and says : • Camels, you granny— they're spiders ! ' ' Spiders in a desert, you shad ? Spiders walk- ing in a procession ? You don't ever reflect, Huck Finn, and I reckon you really haven't got anything to reflect with. Don't you know we're as much as a mile up in the air, and that that string of crawlers is two or three miles away '? Spiders — good land ! Spiders as big as a cow ? P'raps you'd like to go down and milk one of 'em. But they're camels, just the same. It's a caravan, that's what it is, and it's a mile long.' 1 Well, then, le's go down and look at it. I don't believe in it, and ain't going to till I see it and know it.' 'All right,' he says, and give the command: 1 Lower away ! ' As we come slanting down into the hot weather, we could see that it was camels, sure enough, plod- ding along, an everlasting string of them, with bales strapped to them, and several hundred men in long white robes, and a thing like a shawl bound 8o TOM SAWYER ABROAD over their heads and hanging down with tassela and fringes; and some of the men had long guns and some hadn't, and some was riding and some was walking. And the weather — well, it was just roasting. And how slow they did creep along ! W« swooped down, now, all of a sudden, and stopped about a hundred yards over their heads. The men all set up a yell, and some of them fell flat on their stomachs, some begun to fire their guns at us, and the rest broke and scampered every which way, and so did the camels. We see that we was making trouble, so we went up again about a mile, to the cool weather, and watched them from there. It took them an hour to get together and form the procession again ; then they started along, but we could see by the glasses that they wasn't paying much attention to anything but us. We poked along, looking down at them with the glasses, and by-and-by we big sand mound, and something like people the other side of it, and there was something like a man laying on top of the mound, that raised his head up every now and then, and seemed to be watching SWOOPED DOWN, NOW ALL OF A SUDDEN, AND STOPPED ABOUT A HUNDRED YARDS OVER THEIR HEADS ' 82 TOM SAWYER ABROAD the caravan or us, we didn't know which. As the caravan got nearer, he sneaked down on the other side and rushed to the other men and horses — for that is what they was — and we see them mount in a hurry ; and next, here they come, like a house afire, some with lances and some with long guns, and all of them yelling the best they could. They come a-tearing down on to the caravan, and the next minute both sides crashed together and was all mixed up, and there was such another popping of guns as you never heard, and the ail got so full of smoke you could only catch glimpses of them struggling together. There must 'a' been six hundred men in that battle, and it was terrible to see. Then they broke up into gangs and groups, fighting tooth and nail, and scurrying and scamper- ing around, and laying into each other like every- thing ; and whenever the smoke cleared a little you could see dead and wounded people and camels scattered far and wide and all about, and camels racing off in every direction. At last the robbers see they couldn't win, so their chief sounded a signal, and all that was left TOM SAWYER ABROAD 83 of them broke away, and went scampering across the plain. The last man to go snatched up a THE LAST MAN TO GO SNATCHED UP A CHILD AND CARRIED IT OFF IN FRONT OF HIM ON HIS HORSE ' child, and carried it off in front of him on his horse ; and a woman run screaming and begging G 2 84 TOM SAWYER ABROAD after hiin, and followed hira away off across the plain till she was separated a long ways from her people ; but it warn't no use, and she had to give it up, and we see her sink down on the sand and cover her face with her hands. Then Tom took the helium, and started for that yahoo, and we come a-whizzing down and made a swoop, and knocked him out of the saddle, child and all ; and he was jarred con- siderable, but the child wasn't hurt, but laid there working its hands and legs in the air like a tumble- bug that's on its back and can't turn over. The man went staggering off to overtake liis horse, and didn't know what had hit him, for we was three or four hundred yards up in the air by this time. We judged the woman would go and get the child now, but she didn't. We could see her, through the glass, still setting there, with her head bowed down on her knees ; so of course she hadn't seen the performance, and thought her child was clean gone with the man. She was nearly a half a mile from her people, so we thought we might go down to the child, which was about a quarter of a mile bevond her, and snake it to her before the TOM SAWYER ABROAD 85 caravan-people could git to us to do us any harm ; and, besides, we reckoned they had enough business WE COME A-WHIZZINU DOWN AND MADE A SWOOP, AND KNOCKED HIM OUT OF THE SADDLE, CHILD AND ALL ' on their hands for one while, anyway, with the wounded. We thought we'd chance it, and we did. 86 TOM SAWYER ABROAD We swooped down and stopped, and Jim shinned down the ladder and fetched up the cub, which was a nice fat little thing, and in a noble good humour, too, considering it was just out of a battle and been tumbled off of a horse ; and then we started for the mother, and stopped back of her and tolerable near by, and Jim slipped down and crept up easy, and when he was close back of her the child goo-goo'd, the way a child does, and she heard it, and whirled and fetched a shriek of joy, and made a jump for the kid and snatched it and hugged it, and dropped it and hugged Jim, and then snatched off a gold chain and hung it around Jim's neck, and hugged him again, and jerked up the child again and mashed it to her breast, a- sobbing and glorifying all the time ; and Jim he shoved for the ladder and up it, and in a minute we was back up in the sky, and the woman was staring up, with the back of her head between her shoulders and the child with its arms locked around her neck. And there she stood, as long as we was in sight a-sailiug away in the sky. TOM SAWYER ABROAD 87 CHAPTER VII 1 Noon ! ' says Tom, and so it was. His shadder was just a blot around his feet. We looked, and the Grinnage clock was so close to twelve the difference didn't amount to nothing. So Tom said London was right north of us or right south of us, one or t'other, and he reckoned by the weather and the sand and the camels it was north ; and a good many miles north, too — as many as from New York to the city of Mexico, he guessed. Jim said he reckoned a balloon was a good deal the fastest thing in the world, unless it might be some kinds of birds — a wild pigeon, maybe, or a railroad. But Tom said he had read about railroads in England going nearly a hundred miles an hour for a little ways, and there never was a bird in the world that could do that, except one— and that was a flea. 88 TOM SAWYER ABROAD ' A flea ? Why, Mars Tom, in de fust place he ain't a bird, strickly speakin' ' * He ain't a bird, ain't he ? Well, then, what is he?' ' I don't rightly know, Mars Tom, but I speck he's only jist a animal. No, I reckon dat won't do, nuther— he ain't big enough for a animal. He mus' be a bug. Yassir,dat's what he is — he's a bug.' 1 1 bet he ain't, but let it go. What's your second place ? ' 1 Well, in de second place, birds is creturs dat goes a long ways, but a flea don't.' 1 He don't, don't he ? Come, now, what is a long distance, if you know ? ' 1 Why, it's miles, en lots of 'em — anybody knows dat.' 1 Can't a man walk miles ? ' ' Yassir, he kin.' ' As many as a railroad ? ' ' Yassir, if you give him time.' 'Can't a flea?' 1 Well, I s'pose so — ef you gives him heaps of time.' TOM SAWYER ABROAD 89 1 Now you begin to see, don't you, that distance ain't the thing to judge by at all ; it's the time it takes to go the distance in, that counts, ain't it ? ' 1 Well, hit do look sorter so, but I wouldn't 'a' b'lieved it, Mars Tom.' 1 It's a matter of proportion, that's what it is ; and when you come to gauge a thing's speed by its size, where's your bird, and your man, and your railroad, alongside of a flea ? The fastest man can't run more than about ten miles in an hour — not much over ten thousand times his own length. But all the books says any common ordinary third- class flea can jump a hundred and fifty times his own length ; yes, and he can make five jumps a second, too — seven hundred and fifty times his own length in one little second ; for he don't fool away any time stopping and starting— he does them both at the same time; you'll see if you try to put your finger on him. Now, that's a common ordinary third-class flea's gait; but you take an Eyetalian y?rs£-class, that's been the pet of the nobility all his life, and hasn't ever knowed what want or sickness or exposure was, and he can jump TOM SAWYER ABROAD 91 more than three hundred times his own length, and keep it up all day, five such jumps every second — which is fifteen hundred times his own length. Well, suppose a man could go fifteen hundred times his own length in a second — say, a mile and a half. It's ninety miles a minute ; it's considerable more than five thousand miles an hour. Where's your man now ? — yes, and your bird, and your railroad, and your balloon ? Laws ! they don't amount to shucks 'longside of a flea. A flea is just a comet b'iled down small.' Jim was a good deal astonished, and so was I. Jim said : ' Is dem figgers jist edjackly true, en no jokin' en no lies, Mars Tom ? ' ' Yes, they are ; they're perfectly true.' • Well, den, honey, a body's got to respec' a flea. I ain't had no respec' for um befo', scasely, but dey ain' no gittin' roun' it — dey do deserve it, dat's certain.' • Well, I bet they do. They've got ever so much more sense, and brains, and brightness, in propor- tion to their size, than any other cretur in the 92 TOM SAWYER ABROAD '•'AND WHBBl'l XOCB HAILIiOAD, 'LONGS!!*!: OF A FLEA?" ' TOM SAWYER ABROAD 93 world. A person can learn them 'most anything ; and they learn it quicker than any other cretur, too. They've been learnt to haul little carriages in harness, and go this way and that way and t'other way according to orders ; yes, and to march and drill like soldiers, doing it as exact, according to orders, as soldiers does it. They've been learnt to do all sorts of hard and troublesome things. S'pose you could cultivate a flea up to the size of a man, and keep his natural smartness a-growing and a-growing right along up, bigger and bigger, and keener and keener, in the same proportion — where' d the human race be, do you reckon ? That flea would be President of the United States, and you couldn't any more prevent it than you can prevent lightning.' ' My Ian', Mars Tom ! I never knowed dey was so much to de beas'. No, sir; I never had no idea of it, and dat's de facV 'There's more to him, by a long sight, than there is to any other cretur, man or beast, in pro- portion to size. He*s the interestingest of them all. People have so much to say about an ant's TO M SAWYER ABROAD 95 strength, and an elephant's, and a locomotive's. Shucks ! they don't begin with a flea. He can lift two or three hundred times his own weight, and none of them can come anywhere near it. And moreover, he has got notions of his own, and is very particular, and you can't fool him : his instinct, or his judgment, or whatever it is, is perfectly sound and clear, and don't ever make a mistake. People think all humans are alike to a flea. It ain't so. There's folks that he won't go near, hungry or not hungry, and I'm one of them. I've never had one of them on me in my life.' ♦ Mars Tom ! ' ' It's so ; I ain't joking.' 1 Well, sah, I hain't ever heard de likes er dat befo'.' Jim couldn't believe it, and I couldn't ; so we had to drop down to the sand and git a supply, and see. Tom was right. They went for me and Jim by the thousand, but not a one of them lit on Tom. There warn't no explaining it, but there it was, and there warn't no getting around it. He said it bad always been just so, and he'd just as soon be 96 TOM SAWYER ABROAD where there was a million of them as not, they'd never touch him nor bother him. We went up to the cold weather for a freeze-out, and stayed a little spell, and then come back to the comfortable weather and went lazying along twenty or twenty-five miles an hour, the way we'd been doing for the last few hours. The reason was that the longer we was in that solemn, peaceful Desert the more the hurry and fuss got kind of soothed down in us, and the more happier and contented and satisfied we got to feeling, and the more we got to liking the Desert, and then loving it. So we had cramped the speed down, as I was saying, and was having a most noble good lazj 7 time, sometimes watching through the glasses, sometimes stretched out on the lockers reading, sometimes taking a nap. It didn't seem like we was the same lot that was in such a sweat to find land and git ashore, but it was. But we had got over that — clean over it. We was used to the balloon now, and not afraid any more, and didn't want to be anywheres else. Why, it seemed just like home ; it 'most seemed as if I had been born and raised in it, and Jim and TOM SAWYER ABROAD 97 Tom said the same. And always I had had hate- ful people around me, a-nagging at me, and pester- ing of me, and scolding and finding fault, and fussing and bothering, and sticking to me, and keeping after me, and making me do this, and making me do that and t'other, and always selecting out the things I didn't want to do, and then giving me Sam Hill because I shirked and done something else, and just aggravating the life out of a body all the time ; but up here in the sky it was so still, and sunshiny and lovely, and plenty to eat, and plenty of sleep, and strange things to see, and no nagging and pestering, and no good people, and just holiday all the time. Land! I warn't in no hurry to git out and buck at civilisa- tion again. Now, one of the worst things about civilisation is that anybody that gits a letter with trouble in it comes and tells you all about it, and makes you feel bad, and the newspapers fetches you the troubles of everybody all over the world, and keeps you down hearted and dismal 'most all the time, and it's such a heavy load for a person. I hate them newspapers, and I hate letters ; and if H 98 TOM SAWYER ABROAD I had my way I wouldn't allow nobody to load his troubles on to other folks he ain't acquainted with, on t'other side of the world, that way. Well, up in a balloon there ain't any of that, and it's the darlingest place there is. We had supper, and that night was one of the prettiest nights I ever see. The moon made it just like daylight, only a heap softer; and once we see a lion standing all alone by himself, just all alone in the earth, it seemed like, and his shadder laid on the sand by him like a puddle of ink. That's the kind of moonlight to have. Mainly we laid on our backs and talked ; we didn't want to go to sleep. Tom said we was right in the midst of the ' Arabian Nights ' now. He said it was right along here that one of the 'cutest things in that book happened; so we looked down and watched while he told about it, because there ain't anything that is so interesting to look at as a place that a book has talked about. It was a tale about a camel-driver that had lost his camel, and he come along in the Desert and met a man, and says : TOM SAWYER ABROAD 99 ' Have you run across a stray camel to-day ? ' And the man says : ' Was he blind in his left eye ? ' ' Yes.' ' Had he lost an upper front tooth ? ' 'Yes.' ' Was his off hind leg lame ? ' 'Yes.' ' Was he loaded with millet seed on one side and honey on the other ? ' ' Yes, but you needn't go into no more details — that's the one, and I'm in a hurry. Where did you see him ? ' ' I hain't seen him at all,' the man says. ' Hain't seen him at all ? How can you describe him so close, then ? ' ' Because when a person knows how to use his eyes, everything has got a meaning to it ; but most people's eyes ain't any good to them. I knowed a camel had been along, because I seen his track. I knowed he was lame in his off hind leg because he had favoured that foot and trod light on it and his track showed it. I knowed he was blind on his H2 ioo TOM SAWYER ABROAD left side because he only nibbled the grass on the right side of the trail. I knowed he had lost an upper front tooth because where he bit into the sod his teeth-print showed it. The millet seed sifted out on one side — the ants told me that ; the honey leaked out on the other — the flies told me that. I know all about your camel, but I hain't seen him.' Jim says : ' Go on, Mars Tom ; hit's a mighty good tale, and powerful interestinY ' That's all,' Tom says. 1 All ? ' says Jim, astonished. • What 'come o' de camel ? ' ' I don't know.' * Mars Tom, don't de tale say ? ' 'No.' Jim puzzled a minute, then he says : ' Well ! ef dat ain't de beatenes' tale ever J struck. Jist gits to de place whah de intrust is gittin' red hot, en down she breaks. Why, Mars Tom, dey ain't no sense in a tale dat acts like dat. Hain't you got no idea whether de man got de camel back er not ? ' TOM SAWYER ABROAD 101 ' No, I haven't.' I see myself there warn't no sense in the tale, to chop square off that way, before it come to any- thing, but I warn't going to say so, because I could see Tom was souring up pretty fast over the way it flatted out and the way Jim had popped on to the weak place in it, and I don't think it's fair for everybody to pile on to a feller when he's down. But Tom he whirls on me and says : ' What do you think of the tale ? ' Of course, then I had to come out and make a clean breast, and say it did seem to me 'too, same as it did to Jim, that as long as the tale stopped square in the middle, and never got to no place, it really warn't worth the trouble of telling. Tom's chin dropped on his breast, and 'stead of being mad, as I reckoned he'd be, to hear me scoff at his tale that way, he seemed to be only sad ; and he says : ' Some people can see, and some can't — just as that man said. Let alone a camel, if a cyclone had gone by, you duffers wouldn't 'a' noticed the track.' io2 TOM SAWYER ABROAD I don't know what he meant by that, and he didn't say ; it was just one of his irrulevances, I reckon — he was full of them sometimes, when he was in a close place and couldn't see no other way out— but I didn't mind. We'd spotted the soft place in that tale sharp enough — he couldn't git away from that little fact. It gravelled him like the nation, too, I reckon, much as he tried not to let on. TOM SAWYER ABROAD 103 CHAPTER VIII We had an early breakfast in the morning, and set looking down on the Desert, and the weather was ever so bammy and lovely, although we warn't high up. You have to come down lower and lower after sundown in the Desert, because it cools off so fast ; and so by the time it is getting towards dawn you are skimming along only a little ways above the sand. We was watching the shadder of the balloon slide along the ground, and now and then gazing off across the Desert to see if anything was stirring, and then down at the shadder again, when all of a sudden almost right under us we see a lot of men and camels laying scattered about, perfectly quiet, like they was asleep. We shut off the power, and backed up and 104 TOM SAWYER ABROAD stood over them, and then we see that they was all dead. It give us the cold shivers. And it made us hush down, too, and talk low, like people at a funeral. We dropped down slow, and stopped, and me and Tom dumb down and went amongst them. There was men, and women, and children. They was dried by the sun, and dark and Bhriveiled and leathery, like the pictures of mummies you see in books. And yet they looked just as human, you wouldn't 'a' believed it; just like they was asleep — some laying on their backs, with their arms spread on the sand, some on their sides, some on their faces, just as natural, though the teeth showed more than usual. Two or three was setting up. One was a woman, with her head bent over, and a child was laying across her lap. A man was setting with his hands locked around his knees, staring out of his dead eyes at a young girl that was stretched out before him. He looked so mournful, it was pitiful to see. And you never see a place so still as that was. He had straight black hair hanging down by his cheeks, and when a little faint breeze fanned it and made it wag, it TOM SAWYER ABROAD 105 made me shudder, because it seemed as if he was wagging his head. Some of the people and animals was partly covered with sand, but most of them not, for the sand was thin there, and the bed was gravel, and hard. Most of the clothes had rotted away and left the bodies partly naked ; and when you took hold of a rag, it tore with a touch, like spider-web. Tom reckoned they had been laying there for years. Some of the men had rusty guns by them, some had swords on and had shawl-belts with long silver-mounted pistols stuck in them. All the camels had their loads on yet, but the packs had busted or rotted and spilt the freight out on the ground. We didn't reckon the swords was any good to the dead people any more, so we took one apiece, and some pistols. We took a small box, too, because it was so handsome and inlaid so fine ; and then we wanted to bury the people ; but there warn't no way to do it that we could think of, and nothing to do it with but sand, and that would blow away again, of course. We did start to cover up that poor girl, first laying some shawls from a 106 TOM SAWYER ABROAD busted bale on her ; but when we was going to put sand on her, the man's hair wagged again and give us a shock, and we stopped, because it looked like he was trying to tell us he didn't want her covered up so he couldn't see her no more. I reckon she was dear to him, and he would 'a' been so lonesome. Then we mounted high and sailed away, and pretty soon that black spot on the sand was out of sight, and we wouldn't ever see them poor people again in this world. We wondered, and reasoned, and tried to guess how they come to be there, and how it all happened to them, but we couldn't make it out. First we thought maybe they got lost, and wandered around and about till their food and water give out and they starved to death; but Tom said no wild animals nor vultures hadn't meddled with them, and so that guess wouldn't do. So at last we give it up, and judged we wouldn't think about it no more, because it made us low-spirited. Then we opened the box, and it had gems and jewels in it, quite a pile, and some little veils of the kind the dead women had on, with fringes made out of curious gold money that we warn't acquainted TOM SAWYER ABROAD 107 with. We wondered if we better go and try to find them again and give it back ; but Tom thought it i Y < over and said no ; it was a country that was full of robbers, and they would come and steal it, and then 108 TOM SAWYER ABROAD the sin would be on us for putting the temptation in their way. So we went on ; but I wished we had took all they had, so there wouldn't 'a' been no temptation at all left. We had had two hours of that blazing weather down there, and was dreadful thirsty when we got aboard again. We went straight for the water, but it was spoiled and bitter, besides being pretty near hot enough to scald your mouth. We couldn't drink it. It was Mississippi river water, the best in the world, and we stirred up the mud in it to see if that would help ; but no, the mud wasn't any better than the water. Well, we hadn't been so very, very thirsty before, whilst we was interested in the lost people, but we was now, and as soon as we found we couldn't have a drink we was more than thirsty — five times as thirsty as we was a quarter of a minute before. Why, in a little while we wanted to hold our mouths open and pant like a dog. Tom said keep a sharp look-out all around, e very wheres," because we'd got to find an oasis, or there warn't no telling what would happen. So TOM SAWYER ABROAD 109 we done it. We kept the glasses gliding around all the time, till our arms got so tired we couldn't hold them any more. Two hours — three hours — just gazing and gazing, and nothing but sand, sand, sand, and you could see the quivering heat-shimmer playing over it. Dear, dear ! a body don't know what real misery is till he is thirsty all the way through and is certain he ain't ever going to come to any water any more. At last I couldn't stand it to look around on them baking plains ; I laid down on the locker and give it up. But by-and-by Tom raised a whoop, and there she was. A lake, wide and shiny, with pam trees leaning over it asleep, and their shadders in the water just as soft and delicate as ever you see. I never see anything look so good. It was a long ways off, but that warn't anything to us ; we just slapped on a hundred-mile gait, and calculated to be there in seven minutes ; but she stayed the same old distance away all the time— we couldn't seem to gain on her ; yes, sir, just as far, and shiny, and like a dream, but we couldn't get no nearer ; and at last, all of a sudden, she was gone. no ?OM SAWYER ABROAD Tom's eyes took a spread, and he says : 1 Boys, it was a ?nyridge ! ' Said it like he was glad. I didn't see nothing to be glad about. I says : ' Maybe. I don't care nothing about its name : the thing I want to know is, what's become of it ? ' Jim was trembling all over, and so scared he couldn't speak, but he wanted to ask that question himself if he could 'a' done it. Tom says : ' What's ha-ontc of it ? Why, you see yourself it's gone.' 1 Yes, I know ; but where's it gone to ? ' He looked me over and says : Well, now, Huck Finn, where would it go to ? Don't you know what a myridge is ? ' ' No, I don't. What is it ? ' 'It ain't anything but imagination. There ain't anything to it.' It warmed me up a little to hear him talk like that, and I says : 1 What's the use you talking that kind of stuff, Tom Sawyer ? Didn't I see the lake ? ' ' Yes ; you think you did.' TOM SAWYER ABROAD m ' I don't think nothing about it ; I did see it.' ' I tell you you didn't see it, either — because it warn't there to see.' It astonished Jim to hear him talk so, and he broke in and says, kind of pleading and dis- tressed : ' Mars Tom, please don't say sich things in sich an awful time as dis. You ain't only reskin' yo' own self, but you's reskin' us— same way like Anna Nias en Suffira. De lake wuz dah — I seen it jis' as plain as I sees you en Huck dis minute.' I says : ' Why, he seen it himself ! He was the very one that seen it first. Noic, then.' ' Yes, Mars Tom, hit's so — you can't deny it. We all seen it, en dat prove it was dah.' 1 Proves it ! How does it prove it ? ' ' Same way it does in de courts en everywheres, Mars Tom. One pusson might be drunk or dreamy or suthin',en he could be mistaken; en two might, maybe; but I tell you, sah, when three sees a thing, drunk er sober, it's so. Dey ain't no gittin' aroun' dat, en you knows it, Mars Tom.' ii2 TOM SAWYER ABROAD 1 1 don't know nothing of the kind. There used to be forty thousand million people that seen the sun move from one side of the sky to the other every day. Did that prove that the sun done it ? ' ' 'Course it did. En, besides, dey warn't no 'casion to prove it. A body 'at's got any sense ain't gwyne to doubt it. Dah she is now — a sailin' thoo de sky des like she allays done.' Tom turned on me then, and says : 1 What do you say — is the sun standing still ? ' ' Tom Sawyer, what's the use to ask such a jackass question ? Anybody that ain't blind can see it don't stand still.' ' Well,' he says, ' I'm lost in the sky with no company but a passel of low-down animals that don't know no more than the head boss of a uni- versity did three or four hundred years ago. W r hy, blame it, Huck Finn, there was Popes, in them days, that knowed as much as you do.' It warn't fair play, and I let him know it. I says : 'Throwin' mud ain't arguin', Tom Sawyer.' ' Who's throwin' mud ? ' TOM SAWYER ABROAD 113 1 You done it.' ' I never. It ain't no disgrace, I reckon, to compare a backwoods Missouri muggins like you to a Pope, even the orneriest one that ever set on the throne. Why it's an honour to you, you tadpole ; the Pope's the one that's hit hard, not you, and you couldn't blame him for cussing about it, only they don't cuss. Not now they don't, I mean.' ' Sho, Tom, did they ever ? ' 1 In the Middle Ages ? Why, it was their com- mon diet.' ' No ! You don't really mean they cussed ? ' That started his mill a-going, and he ground out a regular speech, the way he done sometimes when he was feeling his oats ; and I got him to write down some of the last half of it for me, because it was like book-talk and tough to remember, and had words in it that I warn't used to, and is pretty tiresome to spell : 1 Yes, they did. I don't mean that they went charging around the way Ben Miller does, and put the cuss-words just the same way he puts them. No ; they used the same words, but they put them H4 TOM SAWYER ABROAD together different, because they'd been learnt by the very best masters, and they knowed hmr, which Ben Miller don't, because he just picked it up here and there and around, and hadn't had no competent person to learn him. But they knowed. It warn't no frivolous random cussing, like Ben Miller's, that starts in anywheres and comes out nowheres — it was scientific cussing, and systematic ; and it was stern, and solemn, and awful — not a thing for you to stand off and laugh at, the way people does when that poor ignorant Ben Miller gits a-going. Why, Ben Miller's kind can stand up and cuss a person a week, steady, and it wouldn't phaze him no more than a goose cackling ; but it was a mighty different thing in them Middle Ages when a Pope, educated to cuss, got his cussing- things together and begun to lay into a king, or a kingdom, or a heretic, or a Jew, or anybody that was unsatisfactory and needed straightening out. He didn't go at it harum-scarum ; no, he took that king or that other person, and begun at the top, and cussed him all the way down in detail. He cussed him in the hairs of his head, and in the TOM SAWYER ABROAD 115 bones of his skull, and in the hearing of his ears, and in the sight of his eyes, and in the breath of his nostrils, and in his vitals, and in his veins, and in his limbs and his feet and his hands, and the blood and flesh and bones of his whole body ; and cussed him in the loves of his heart and in his friendships, and turned him out in the world, and cussed anybody that give him food to eat, or shelter and bed, or water to drink, or rags to cover him when he was freezing. Land ! that was cussing worth talking about ; that was the only cussing worth shucks that's ever been done in this world — the man it fell on, or the country it fell on, would better 'a' been dead forty times over. Ben Miller ! The idea of him thinking he can cuss ! Why, the poorest little one-horse back-country bishop in the Middle Ages could cuss all around him. We don't know nothing about cussing nowadays.' 1 Well,' I says, * you needn't cry about it ; I reckon we can get along. Can a bishop cuss now the way they useter ? ' ' Yes, they learn it because it's part of the polite learning that belongs to his lay-out — kind of bells 12 n6 TOM SAWYER ABROAD letters, as you may say — and although he ain't got no more use for it than Missouri girls has for French, he's got to learn it, same as they do, because a Missouri girl that can't polly-voo and a bishop that can't cuss ain't got no business in society.' * Don't they ever cuss at all now, Tom ? ' ' Not but very seldom. P'r'aps they do in Peru, but amongst people that knows anything it's played out, and they don't mind it no more than they do Ben Miller's kind. It's because they've got so far along that they know as much now as the grasshoppers did in the Middle Ages.' 1 The grasshoppers ? ' ' Yes. In the Middle Ages, in France, when the grasshoppers started in to eat up the crops, the bishop would go out in the fields and pull a solemn face and give them a most solid good cussing. Just the way they done with a Jew or a heretic or a king, as I was telling you.' 1 And what did the grasshoppers do, Tom ? ' 1 Just laughed, and went on and et up the crop, same as they started in to do. The difference TOM SAWYER ABROAD 117 betwixt a man and a grasshopper, in the Middle Ages, was that the grasshopper warn't a fool.' ' Oh, my goodness, oh, my goodness gracious, dah's de lake a'gin ! ' yelled Jim just then. ' Now, Mars Tom, what you gwyne to say ? ' Yes sir, there was the lake again, away yonder across the Desert, perfectly plain, trees and all, just the same as it was before. I says : 1 1 reckon you're satisfied now, Tom Sawyer.' But he says, perfectly cam : ' Yes, satisfied there ain't no lake there.' Jim says : ' Don't talk so, Mars Tom — it sk'yers me to hear you. It's so hot, en you's so thirsty, dat you ain't in yo' right mine, Mars Tom. Oh, but don't she look good ! 'Clah I doan' know how I's gwyne to wait tell we gits dah, I's so thirsty.' ' Well, you'll have to wait ; and it won't do you no good, either, because there ain't no lake there, I tell you.' I says : ■ Jim, don't you take your eye off of it, and I won't either.' n8 TOM SAWYER ABROAD ' 'Deed I won't ; en bless you, honey, I couldn't ef I wanted to.' We went a-tearing along towards it, piling the miles behind us like nothing, but never gaining an inch on it— and all of a sudden it was gone again ! Jim staggered and 'most fell down. When he got his breath he says, gasping like a fish : ' Mars Tom, hit's a ghos', dats what it is, en 1 hopes to goodness we ain't gwyne to see it no mo'. Dey's ben a lake, en suthin's happened, en de lake's dead, en we's seen its ghos' ; we's seen it twyste, and dat's proof. De Desert's ha'nted — it's ha'nted, sho. Oh, Mars Tom, le's git outen it — I'd rather die than have de night ketch us in it ag'in, en de ghos' er dat lake come a-mournin' aroun' us, en we asleep en doan' know de danger we's in.' ' Ghost, you gander ! it ain't anything but air and heat and thirstiness pasted together by a person's imagination. If I Gimme the glass ! He grabbed it, and begun to gaze off to the right. 1 It's a flock of birds,' he says. ' It's getting towards sundown, and they're making a bee-line TOM SAWYER ABROAD 119 across our track for somewheres. They mean business — maybe they're going for food or water, or both. Let her go to starboard ! — port your helium ! Hard down! There— ease up— steady, as you go-' • We shut down some of the power, so as not to out-speed them, and took out after them. We went skimming along a quarter of a mile behind them, and when we had followed them an hour and a half and was getting pretty discouraged, and thirsty clean to unendurableness, Tom says : 1 Take the glass, one of you, and see what that is, away ahead of the birds.' Jim got the first glimpse, and slumped down on a locker, sick. He was 'most crying, and says : 1 She's dah agi'n, Mars Tom — she's dah ag'in, en I knows I's gwyne to die, 'case when a body sees a ghos' de third time, dat's what it means. I wisht I'd never come in dis balloon, dat I does.' He wouldn't look no more, and what he said made me afraid too, because I knowed it was true, for that has always been the way with ghosts ; so 120 TOM SAWYER ABROAD then I wouldn't look any more either. Both of us begged Tom to turn off and go some other way, but he wouldn't, and said we was ignorant superstitious blatherskites. Yes, and he'll git come up with one of these days, I says to myself, insulting ghosts that way. They'll stand it for awhile, maybe, but they won't stand it always, for anybody that knows about ghosts knows how easy they are hurt, and how revengeful they are. So we was all quiet and still, Jim and me being scared, and Tom busy. By-and-by Tom fetched the balloon to a standstill, and says : ' Now get up and look, you sapheads!' We done it, and there was the sure-enough water right under us ! — clear, and blue, and cool, and deep, and wavy with the breeze, the loveliest sight that ever was. And all about it was grassy banks, and flowers, and shady groves of big trees, looped together with vines, and all looking so peaceful and comfortable, enough to make a body cry, it was so beautiful. Jim did cry, and rip and dance and carry on, he was so thankful and out of his mind for joy. It TOM SAWYER ABROAD 121 was my watch, so I had to stay by the works, but Tom and Jim dumb down and drunk a barrel apiece, and fetched me up a lot, and I've tasted a many a good thing in my life, but nothing that ever begun with that water. Then they went down and had a swim, and then Tom come up and spelled me, and me and Jim had a swim, and then Jim spelled Tom, and me and Tom had a foot-race and a boxing-mill, and I don't reckon I ever had such a good time in my life. It warn't so very hot, because it was close on to evening, and we hadn't any clothes on, anyway. Clothes is well enough in school, and in towns, and at balls, too, but there ain't no sense in them when there ain't no civilisa- tion nor other kinds of bothers and fussiness around. ' Lions a-comin' ! — lions ! Quick, Mars Tom ! Jump for yo' life, Huck ! ' Oh, and didn't we? We never stopped for clothes, but walzed up the ladder just so. Jim lost his head straight off — he always done it when- ever he got excited and scared : and so now, 'stead of just easing the ladder up from the ground 122 TOM SAWYER ABROAD a little, so the animals couldn't reach it, he turned on a raft of power, and we went whizzing up and was dangling in the sky before he got his wits to- gether and seen what a foolish thing he was doing. Then he stopped her, but had clean forgot what to do next ; so there we was, so high that the lions looked like pups, and we was drifting off on the wind. But Tom he shinned up and went for the works and begun to slant her down, and back towards the lake, where the animals was gathering like a camp meeting, and I judged he had lost his head, too ; for he knowed I was too scared to climb, and did he want to dump me amongst the tigers and things '? But no ; his head was level — he knowed what he was about. He swooped down to within thirty or forty foot of the lake, and stopped right over the centre, and sung out : ' Leggo, and drop ! ' I done it, and shot down, feet first, and seemed to go about a mile towards the bottom ; and when I come up, he says : TOM SAWYER ABROAD 123 ' Now lay on your back and float till you're rested and got your pluck back ; then I'll dip the ladder in the water and you can climb aboard.' I done it. Now, that was ever so smart in Tom, because if he had started off somewheres else to drop down on the sand, the menagerie would 'a' come along too, and might 'a' kept us hunting a safe place till I got tuckered out and fell. And all this time the lions and tigers was sorting out the clothes, and trying to divide them up so there would be some for all, but there was a mis- understanding about it somewheres, on accounts of some of them trying to hog more than their share ; so there was another insurrection, and you never see anything like it in the world. There must 'a' been fifty of them, all mixed up together, snorting and roaring and snapping and biting and tearing, legs and tails in the air, and you couldn't tell which belonged to which, and the sand and fur a-flying. And when they got done, some was dead, and some was limping off crippled, and the rest was setting around on the battlefield, some of them licking their sore places and the others looking up at us and seemed to be 124 TOM SAWYER ABROAD AND ALL THIS TI31E THE LIONS ANH TIGE11S WAS SORTING OUT TOM SAWYER ABROAD 125 kind ofinviting us to come down and have some fun, but which we didn't want any. As for the clothes, there warn't any any more. Every last rag of them was inside of the animals ; and not agreeing with them very well, I don't reckon, for there was considerable many brass buttons on them, and there was knives in the pockets, too, and smoking-tobacco, and nails and chalk and marbles and fishhooks and things. But I wasn't caring. All that was bothering me was that all we had now was the professor's clothes — a big enough assort- ment, but not suitable to go into company with, if we come across any, because the britches was as long as tunnels, and the coats and things according. Still, there was everything a tailor needed, and Jim was a kind of a jack-legged tailor, and he allowed he could soon trim a suit or two down for us that would answer. 126 TOM SAWYER ABROAD CHAPTER IX Still, we thought we would drop down there a minute, but on another errand. Most of the pro- fessor's cargo of food was put up in cans, in the new way that somebody had just invented, the rest was fresh. When you fetch Missouri beefsteak to the Great Sahara, you want to be particular and stay up in the coolish weather. Ours was all right till we stayed down so long amongst the dead people. That spoilt the water, and it ripened up the beef- steak to a degree that was just right for an English- man, Tom said, but was 'most too gay for Americans ; so we reckoned we would drop down into the lion market and see how we could make out there. We hauled in the ladder and dropped down till we was just above the reach of the animals, then we let down a rope with a slip knot in it and hauled TOM SAWYER ABROAD 127 up a dead lion, a small tender one, then yanked up a cub tiger. We had to keep the congregation off with the revolver, or they would 'a' took a hand in the proceedings and helped. We carved off a supply from both, and saved the skins, and hove the rest overboard. Then we baited some of the professor's hooks with the fresh meat and went a-fishing. We stood over the lake just a convenient distance above the water, and catched a lot of the nicest fish you ever see. It was a most amazing good supper we had : lion steak, tiger steak, fried fish, and hot corn-pone. I don't want nothing better than that. We had some fruit to finish off with. We got it out of the top of a monstrous tall tree. It was a very slim tree, that hadn't a branch on it from the bottom plumb to the top, and there it busted out like a feather duster. It was a pam tree, of course ; anybody knows a pam tree the minute he sees it, by the pictures. We went for coco-nuts in this one, but there warn't none. There was only big loose bunches of things like over-sized grapes, and Tom allowed they was dates, because he 128 TOM SAWYER ABROAD said they answered the description in the ' Arabian Nights ' and the other books. Of course they mightn't be, and they might be p'ison ; so we had to wait a spell, and watch and see if the birds et them. They done it ; so we done it too, and they was most amazing good. By this time monstrous big birds begun to come and settle on the dead animals. They was plucky creturs ; they would tackle one end of a lion that was being gnawed at the other end by another lion. If the lion drove the bird away, it didn't do no good : he was back again the minute the lion was busy. The big birds come out of every part of the sky — you could make them out with the glass whilst they was still so far away you couldn't see them with your naked eye. The dead meat was too fresh to have any smell— at least, any that could reach to a bird that was five mile away ; so Tom said the birds didn't find out the meat was there by the smell— they had to find it out by seeing it. Oh, but ain't that an eye for you ! Tom said at the distance of five mile a patch of dead lions couldn't TOM SAWYER ABROAD 129 look any bigger than a person's finger-nail, and he couldn't imagine how the birds could notice such a little thing so far off. It was strange and unnatural to see lion eat lion, and we thought maybe they warn't kin. But Jim said that didn't make no difference. He said a hog was fond of her own children, and so was a spider, and he reckoned maybe a lion was pretty near as unprincipled, though maybe not quite. He thought likely a lion wouldn't eat his own father, if he knowed which was him, but reckoned he would eat his brother-in-law if he was uncommon hungry, and eat his mother-in-law any time. But reckon- ing don't settle nothing. You can reckon till the cows comes home, but that don't fetch you to no decision. So we give it up and let it drop. Gener'ly it was very still in the Desert, nights, but this time there was music. A lot of other animals come to dinner; sneaking yelpers that Tom allowed was jackals, and roached-backed ones that he said was hyenas ; and all the whole b'iling of them kept up a racket all the time. They made a picture in the moonlight that was more different K i 3 o TOM SAWYER ABROAD than any picture I ever see. We had a line out and made fast to the top of a tree, and didn't stand no watch, but all turned in and slept ; but I was up two or three times to look down at the animals and hear the music. It was like having a front seat at a menagerie for nothing, which I hadn't ever had before, and so it seemed foolish to sleep and not make the most of it : I mightn't ever have such a chance again. We went a-fishing again in the early dawn, and then lazied around all day in the deep shade on an island, taking turn about to watch and see that none of the animals come a-snooping around there after erronorts for dinner. We was going to leave next day, but couldn't— it was too lovely. The day after, when we rose up towards the sky and sailed off eastward, we looked back and watched that place till it warn't nothing but just a speck in the Desert, and I tell you it was like saying good- bye to a friend that you ain't ever going to see any more. Jim was thinking to himself, and at last he says : TOM SAWYER ABROAD 131 ' Mars Tom, we's mos' to de end er de Desert now, I speck.' < Why ? ' ' Well, hit stan' to reason we is. You knows how long we's been a-skimming over it. Mus' be mos' out o' san'. Hit's a wonder to me dat it's hilt out as long as it has.' ' Shucks ! there's plenty sand, you needn't worry.' 1 Oh, I ain't a- worry in', Mars Tom, only won- derin', dat's all. De Lord's got plenty san', I ain't doubtin' dat, but nemmine, He ain't gwyne to was'e it jist on dat account ; en I allows dat dis Desert's plenty big enough now, jist de way she is, en you can't spread her out no mo' 'dout was'in' san'.' 'Oh, go 'long ; we ain't much more than fairly started across this Desert yet. The United States is a pretty big country, ain't it ? Ain't it, Huck ? ' 1 Yes,' I says ; ' there ain't no bigger one, I don't reckon.' ' Well,' he says, ' this Desert is about the shape of the United States, and if you was to lay it down on top of the United States, it would cover the land k2 132 TOM SAWYER ABROAD of the free out of sight like a blanket. There'd be a little corner sticking out, up at Maine, and away up north-west, and Florida sticking out like a turtle's tail, and that's all. We've took California away from the Mexicans two or three years ago, so that part of the Pacific coast is ours now ; and if you laid the Great Sahara down with her edge on the Pacific, she would cover the United States and stick out past New York six hundred miles into the Atlantic Ocean.' I says : ' Good land ! have you got the documents for that, Tom Sawyer ? ' 'Yes, and they're right here, and I've been studying them. You can look for yourself. From New York to the Pacific is 2,600 miles ; from one end of the Great Desert to the other is 3,200. The United States contains 3,600,000 square miles ; the Desert contains 4,162,000. With the Desert's bulk you could cover up every last inch of the United States, and in under where the edges projected out you could tuck England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Denmark, and all Germany. Yes, sir, you could TOM SAWYER ABROAD 133 hide the home of the brave and all of them coun- tries clean out of sight under the Great Sahara, and you would still have 2,000 square miles of sand left.' ' Well/ I says, ' it clean beats me. Why, Tom, it shows that the Lord took as much pains making this Desert as He did to make the United States and all them other countries. I reckon He must 'a' been a- working at this Desert two or three days before He got it done.' Jim says: • Huck, dat doan' stan' to reason. I reckon dis Desert wan't made at all. Now, you take en look at it like dis — you look at it, and see if I's right. What's a desert good for ? 'Tain't good for nuthin'. Dey ain't no way to make it pay. Hain't dat so, Huck?' ' Yes, I reckon.' ' Hain't it so, Mars Tom ? ' 1 1 guess so. Go on.' ' Ef a thing ain't no good, it's made in vain, ain't it ? ' « Yes.' 134 TOM SAWYER ABROAD * Now, den ! Do de Lord make anything in vain ? You answer me dat.' ' Well, no, He don't.' ' Den how come He make a desert ? ' ' Well, go on. How did He come to make it ? ' ' Mars Tom, it's my opinion He never made it at all ; dat is, He didn't plan out no Desert, never sot out to make one. Now I's gwyne to show you, den you kin see. J b'lieve it uz jes' like when you's buildin' a house ; dey's allays a lot o' truck en rubbish lef over. What does you do wid it? Doan' you take en k'yart it off en dump it into a ole vacant back lot ? 'Course. Now, den, it's my opinion hit was jes' like dat. When the Lord uz gwyne to buiP de worl', He tuck en made a lot o' rocks en put 'em in a pile, en made a lot o' yearth en put it in a pile handy to de rocks, den a lot o' san', en put dat in a pile, handy, too. Den He begin. He measure out some rocks en yearth en san', en stick 'em together en say, " Dat's Ger- many," en paste a label on it, en set it out to dry ; en measure out some mo' rocks en yearth en san', en stick 'em together, en say, " Dat's de United TOM SAWYER ABROAD 135 States," en paste a label on it, and set it out to dry ; en so on, en so on, tell it come supper time Sataday, en He look roun' en see dey's all done, en a mighty good worl' for de time she took. Den He notice dat whilst He's cal'lated de yearth en de rocks jes' right, dey's a mos' turrible lot 0' san' lef over, which He can't 'member how it happened. So He look roun' to see if dey's any ole back lot anywheres dat's vacant, en see dis place, en is powerful glad, en tell de angels to take en dump de san' here. Now, den, dat's my idea 'bout it — dat de Great Sahara warn't made at all — she jes' happen'.' I said it was a real good argument, and I believed it was the best one Jim ever made. Tom he said the same, but said the trouble about argu- ments is, they ain't nothing but theories, after all, and theories don't prove nothing : they only give you a place to rest on, a spell, when you are tuckered out butting around and around trying to find out something there ain't no way to find out. And he says : ' There's another trouble about theories : there's always a hole in them somewheres, sure, if you 1 36 TOM SAWYER ABROAD look close enough. It's just so with this one of Jim's. Look what billions and billions of stars there is. How does it come that there was just exactly enough star-stuff, and none left over ? How does it come there ain't no sand-pile up there ? ' But Jim was fixed for him and says : ' What's de Milky Way ?— dat's what 2" wants to know. What's de Milky Way? Answer me dat!' In my opinion it was just a sockdologer. It's only an opinion— it's only my opinion— and others may think different ; but I said it then and I stand to it now - it was a sockdologer. And moreover, besides, it landed Tom Sawyer. He couldn't say a word. He had that stunned look of a person that's been shot in the back with a kag of nails. All he said was, as for peon]eJike_jiie and _Jim ? he'd just as soon have intellectual intercourse with a catfish. But anybody can say that — and I notice they always do when somebody has fetched them a lifter. Tom Sawyer was tired of that end of the subject. So we got back to talking about the size of the TOM SAWYER ABROAD 137 Desert again, and the more we compared it with this and that and t'other thing, the more nobler and bigger and grander it got to look, right along. And so, hunting amongst the figgers, Tom found, by and by, that it was just the same size as the Empire of China. Then he showed us the spread the Empire of China made on the map and the room she took up in the world. Well, it was wonderful to think of, and I says : ' Why, I've heard talk about this Desert plenty of times, but I never knowed, before, how im- portant she was.' Then Tom says : ' Important ! Sahara important ! That's just the way with some people. If a thing's big, it's important. That's all the sense they've got. All they can see is size. Why, look at England. It's . the most important country in the world ; and yet you could put it in China's vest pocket ; and not only that, but you'd have the dickens' own time to find it again the next time you wanted it. And look at Eussia. It spreads all around and every- wheres, and yet ain't no more important in this 1 38 TOM SAWYER ABROAD world than Rhode Island is, and hasn't got half as much in it that's worth saving. My uncle Aimer, which was a Preshyterian preacher and the bluest they make, he always said that if size was a right thing to judge importance by, where would heaven be alongside of the other place ? He always said heaven was the Rhode Island of the Hereafter.' Away off, now, we see a low hill, a-standing up just on the edge of the world. Tom broke off his talk, and reached for a glass, very much excited, and took a look, and says : 'That's it— it's the one I've been looking for, sure. If I'm right it's the one the dervish took the man into and showed him all the treasures of the world.' So we begun to gaze, and he begun to tell about it out of the ' Arabian Nights. TOM SAWYER ABROAD 139 CHAPTEE X Tom said it happened like this. A dervish was stumping it along through the Desert on foot one blazing hot day, and he had come a thousand miles and was pretty poor and hungry, and ornery and tired, and along about where we are now he run across a camel driver with a hundred camels, and asked him for some ams. But the camel driver he asked to be excused. The dervish says : ' Don't you own these camels ? 1 Yes, they're mine.' 1 Are you in debt ? ' 1 Who— me ? No. • Well, a man that owns a hundred camels, and ain't in debt, is rich, and not only rich, but very rich. Ain't it so ? ' i 4 o TOM SAWYER ABROAD The camel driver owned up that it was so. Then the dervish says: ' God has made you rich, and He has made me poor. He has His reasons, and they are wise— blessed be His name ! But He has willed that His rich shall help His poor, and you have turned away from me, your brother, in my need, and He will remember this, and you will lose by it.' That made the camel driver feel shaky, but all the same he was born hoggish after money, and didn't like to let go a cent ; so he begun to whine and explain, and said times was hard, and although he had took a full freight down to Balsora and got a fat rate for it, he couldn't git no return freight, and so he warn't making no great things out of his trip. So the dervish starts along again, and says : 1 All right, if you want to take the risk ; but I reckon you've made a mistake this time, and missed a chance.' Of course the camel driver wanted to know what kind of a chance he had missed, because maybe there was money in it ; so he run after the TOM SAWYER ABROAD 141 dervish and begged him so hard and earnest to take pity on him, and tell him, that at last the dervish give in and says : ' Do you see that hill yonder ? Well, in that hill is all the treasures of the earth, and I was looking around for a man with a particular good kind heart and a noble generous disposition, because if I could find just that man, I've got a kind of a salve I could put on his eyes and he could see the treasures and get them out.' So then the camel driver was in a sweat ; and he cried and begged, and took on, and went down on his knees, and said he was just that kind of a man, and said he could fetch a thousand people that would say he wasn't ever described so exact before. ' Well, then,' says the dervish, ' all right. If we load the hundred camels, can I have half of them ? ' The driver was so glad he couldn't hardly hold in, and says : ' Now you're shouting.' So he shook hands on the bargain, and theder- 1 42 TOM SAWYER ABROAD vish got out his box and rubbed the salve on the driver's right eye, and the hill opened and he went in, and there, sure enough, was piles and piles of gold and jewels sparkling like all the stars in heaven had fell down. So him and the dervish laid into it, and they loaded every camel till he couldn't carry no more ; then they said good-bye, and each of them started off with his fifty. But pretty soon the camel driver came a- running and overtook the dervish and says : • You ain't in society, you know, and you don't really need all you've got. Won't you be good, and let me have ten of your camels ? ' ' Well,' the dervish says, ' I don't know but what you say is reasonable enough.' So he done it, and they separated and the der- vish started off again with his forty. But pretty soon here comes the camel driver bawling after him again, and whines and slobbers around and begs another ten off of him, saying thirty camel loads of treasures was enough to see a dervish through, because they live very simple, you know, THE CAMEL DEIVEE IX THE TEEASUEE CAVE 144 TOM SAWYER ABROAD and don't keep house, but board around and give their note. But that warn't the end, yet. That ornery hound kept coming and coming till he had begged back all the camels and had the whole hundred. Then he was satisfied, and ever so grateful, and said he wouldn't ever forgit the dervish as long as he lived, and nobody hadn't ever been so kind to him before, and liberal. So they shook hands good-bye, and separated and started off again. But do you know, it warn't ten minutes till the camel driver was unsatisfied again — he was the low-downest reptyle in seven counties — and he come a-running again. And this time the thing he wanted was to get the dervish to rub some of the salve on his other eye. ' Why ? ' said the dervish. 1 Oh, you know,' says the driver. 1 Know what ? ' says the dervish. ' Well, you can't fool me,' says the driver. ' You're trying to keep back something from me — you know it mighty well. You know, I reckon, that if I had the salve on the other eye I could see TOM SAWYER ABROAD 145 a lot more things that's valuable. Come — please put it on.' The dervish says : 1 1 wasn't keeping anything back from you. I don't mind telling you what would happen if I put it on. You'd never see again. You'd be stone blind the rest of your days.' But do you know that beat wouldn't believe him. No ; he begged and begged, and whined and cried, till at last the dervish opened his box and told him to put it on if he wanted to. So the man done it, and sure enough he was as blind as a bat in a minute. Then the dervish laughed at him and mocked at him and made fun of him, and says : ' Good-bye — a man that's blind hain't got no use for jewellery.' And he cleared out with the hundred camels, and left that man to wander around poor and miserable and friendless the rest of his days in the Desert. Jim said he'd bet it was a lesson to him. ' Yes,' Tom says, ' and like a considerable many 1 46 TOM SAWYER ABROAD lessons a body gets. They ain't no account, because the thing don't ever happen the same way again and can't. The time Hen Scovil fell down the chimbly and crippled his back for life, everybody said it would be a lesson to him. What kind of a lesson ? How was he going to use it ? He couldn't climb chimblies no more, and he hadn't no more backs to break.' 1 All de same, Mars Tom, dey is sich a thing as learnin' by expe'ence. De Good Book say de burnt chile shun de fire.' ' Well, I ain't denying that a thing's a lesson if it's a thing that can happen twice just the same way. There's lots of such things, and they educate a person — that's what uncle Abner always said ; but there's forty million lots of the other kind — the kind that don't happen the same way twice — and they ain't no real use : they ain't no more instructive than the small-pox. When you've got it it ain't no good to find out you ought to been vaccinated, and it ain't no good to get vaccinated afterwards, because the small- pox don't come but once. But on the other hand uncle Abner said that the person that had took TOM SA WYER ABROAD 147 a bull by the tail once had learnt sixty or seventy times as much as a person that hadn't, and said a person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was gitting knowledge that was always going to be useful to him, and warn't ever going to grow dim or doubtful. But I can tell you, Jim, uncle Abner was down on them people that's all the time trying to dig a lesson out of everything that happens, no matter whether ' But Jim was asleep. Tom looked kind of ashamed, because, you know, a person always feels bad when he is talking uncommon fine and thinks the other person is admiring, and that other person goes to sleep that way. Of course he oughtn't to go to sleep, because it's shabby ; but the finer a person talks the certainer it is to make you sleep, and so, when you come to look at it, it ain't nobody's fault in particular — both of them's to blame. Jim begun to snore — soft and blubbery, at first then a long rasp, then a stronger one, then a half- a-dozen horrible ones like the last water sucking down the plug-hole of a bath-tub, then the same with more power to it, and some big coughs and i 4 8 TOM SAWYER ABROAD snorts flung in, the way a cow does that is choking to death ; and when the person has got to that point he is at his level best, and can wake up a man that is in the next block with a dipper full of loddanum in him, but can't wake himself up although all that awful noise of his'n ain't but three inches from his own ears. And that is the curiosest thing in the world, seems to me. But you rake a match to light the candle, and that little bit of a noise will fetch him. I wish I knowed what was the reason of that, but there don't seem to be no way to find out. Now, there was Jim alarming the whole Desert, and yanking the animals out, for miles and miles around, to see what in the nation was going on up there; there warn't nobody nor nothing that was as close to the noise as he was, and yet he was the only cretur that wasn't disturbed by it. We yelled at him and whooped at him — it never done no good ; but the first time there came a little wee noise that wasn't of a usual kind it woke him up. No, sir ; I've thought it all over, and so has Tom, and there ain't no way to find out why a snorer can't hear himself snore. TOM SAWYER ABROAD 149 Jim said he hadn't been asleep : he just shut his eyes so he could listen better. Tom said nobody warn't accusing him. That made him look like he wished he hadn't said anything. And he wanted to git away from the subject, I reckon, because he begun to abuse the camel driver, just the way a person does when he has got catched in something and wants to take it out of somebody else. He let into the camel driver the hardest he knowed how, and I had to agree with him ; and he praised up the dervish the highest he could, and I had to agree with him there, too. But Tom says : • I ain't so sure. You call that dervish so dreadful liberal and good and unselfish, but I don't quite see it. He didn't hunt up another poor der- vish, did he ? No, he didn't. If he was so un- selfish, why didn't he go in there himself and take a pocketful of jewels and go along and be satisfied ? No, sir ; the person he was hunting for was a man with a hundred camels. He wanted to get away with all the treasure he could ' 150 TOM SAWYER ABROAD 1 Why, Mars Tom, he was willin' to divide, fair and square ; he only struck for fifty camels.' ' Because he knowed how he was going to get all of them by and by.' ' Mars Tom, he talc de man de truck would make him bline.' 1 Yes, because he knowed the man's character. It was just the kind of a man he was hunting for — a man that never believes in anybody's word or anybody's honourableness, because he ain't got none of his own. I reckon there's lots of people like that dervish. They swindle right and left, but they always make the other person seem to swindle him- self. They keep inside of the letter of the law all the time, and there ain't no way to git hold of them. They don't put the salve on — oh, no ; that would be sin — but they know how to fool you into putting it on, then it's you that blinds yourself. I reckon the dervish and the camel driver was just a pair — a fine, smart, brainy rascal, and a dull, coarse, ignorant one, but both of them rascals, just the same.' TOM SAWYER ABROAD 151 ' Mars Tom, docs you reckon dey's any 0' dat kind o' salve in de worl' now ? ' ' Yes, uncle Abner says there is. He says they've got it in New York, and they put it on country people's eyes and show them all the railroads in the world, and they go in and get them, and then when they rub the salve on the other eye the other man bids them good-bye and goes off with their railroads. Here's the treasure hill now. Lower away ! ' We landed, but it warn't as interesting as I thought it was going to be, because we couldn't find the place where they went in to git the treasure. Still, it was plenty interesting enough just to see the mere hill itself where such a wonderful thing happened. Jim said he wouldn't 'a' missed it for three dollars, and I felt the same way. And to me and Jim as wonderful a thing as any was the way Tom could come into a strange big country like this and go straight and find a little hump like that and tell it in a minute from a mil- lion other humps that was almost just like it, and nothing to help him but only his own learning and his own natural smartness. We talked and talked 152 TOM SAWYER ABROAD it over together, but couldn't make out how he done it. He had the best head on him I ever see ; and all he lacked was age to make a name for himself equal to Captain Kidd or George Washington. I bet you it would 'a' crowded either of them to find that hill, with all their gifts, but it warn't nothing to Tom Sawyer : he went across Sahara and put his finger on it as easy as you could pick a nigger out of a bunch of angels. We found a pond of salt water close by, and scraped up a raft of salt around the edges and loaded up the lion's skin and the tiger's so as they would keep till Jim could tan them. TOM SAWYER ABROAD 1 53 CHAPTEE XI We went a-fooling along for a day or two, and then just as the full moon was touching the ground on the other side of the Desert we see a string of little black figgers moving across its big silver face. You could see them as plain as if they was painted on the moon with ink. It was another caravan. We cooled down our speed and tagged along after it, just to have company, though it warn't going our way. It was a rattler, that caravan, and a most bully sight to look at, next morning, when the sun come a-streaming across the Desert and flung the long shadders of the camels on the gold sand like a thousand granddaddy-longlegses marching in pro- cession. We never went very near it, because we knowed better, now, than to act like that and scare people's camels and break up their caravans. It was the gayest outfit you ever see for rich clothes 154 TOM SAWYER ABROAD and nobby style. Some of the chiefs rode on dromedaries— the first we ever see, and very tall, and they go plunging along like they was on stilts, and they rock the man that is on them pretty violent, and churn up his dinner considerable, I bet you ; but they make noble good time, and a camel ain't nowheres with them for speed. The caravan camped during the middle part of the day, and then started again about the middle of the afternoon. Before long the sun begun to look very curious. First it kind of turned to brass, and then to copper, and after that it begun to look like a blood-red ball, and the air got hot and close, and pretty soon all the sky in the west darkened up and looked thick and foggy, but fiery and dreadful, like it looks through a piece of red glass, you know. We looked down and see a big confusion going on in the caravan and a rushing every which way like they was scared, and then they all flopped down flat in the sand and laid there perfectly still. Pretty soon we see something coming that stood up like an amazing wide wall, and reached from the desert up into the sky and hid the sun, and it TOM SAWYER ABROAD 155 was coming like the nation, too. Then a little faint breeze struck us, and then it come harder, and grains of sand begun to sift against our faces and sting like fire, and Tom sung out : ' It's a sand-storm — turn your backs to it ! ' We done it, and in another minute it was blow- ing a gale and the sand beat against us by the shovelful and the air was so thick with it we couldn't see a thing. In five minutes the boat was level full and we was setting on the lockers buried up to the chin in sand, and only our heads out, and could hardly breathe. Then the storm thinned, and we see that mon- strous wall go a-sailing off across the Desert, awful to look at, I tell you. We dug ourselves out and looked down, and where the caravan was before there wasn't anything but just the sand ocean now, and all still and quiet. All them people and camels was smothered and dead and buried — buried under ten foot of sand, we reckoned — and Tom allowed it might be years before the wind uncovered them, and all that time their friends wouldn't ever know what become of that caravan. Tom said : 156 TOM SAWYER ABROAD ' Now we know what it was that happened to the people we got the swords and pistols from.' Yes, sir, that was just it. It was as plain as day now. They got buried in a sand-storm, and the wild animals couldn't get at them, and the wind never uncovered them again till they was dried to leather and warn't fit to eat. It seemed to me we had felt as sorry for them poor people as a person could for anybody, and as mournful too, but we was mistaken ; this last caravan's death went harder with us — a good deal harder. You see, the others was total strangers, and we never got to feeling acquainted with them at all, except, maybe, a little with the man that was watching the girl, but it was different with this last caravan. We was huvvering around them a whole night and 'most a whole day, and had got to feeling real friendly with them, and acquainted. I have found out that there ain't no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them. Just so with these. We kind of liked them from the start, and travelling with them put on the finisher. The longer we travelled with TOM SAWYER ABROAD 157 IX THE SAXP-STORM. i 5 8 TOM SAWYER ABROAD them, and the more we got used to their ways, the hetter and better we liked them and the gladder and gladder we was that we run across them. We had come to know some of them so well that we called them by name when we was talking about them, and soon got so familiar and sociable that we even dropped the Miss and the Mister and just used their plain names without any handle, and it did not seem unpolite, but just the right thing. Of course it wasn't their own names, but names we give them. There was Mr. Elexander Robinson and Miss Adaline Robinson, and Colonel Jacob McDougal, and Miss Harryet McDougal, and Judge Jeremiah Butler and Young Bushred Butler — and these was big chiefs, mostly, that wore splendid great turbans and simmeters and dressed like the Grand Mogul— and their families. But as soon as we come to know them good, and like them very much, it warn't Mister, nor Judge, nor nothing, any more, but only Elleck, and Addy, and Jake, and Hattie, and Jerry, and Buck, and so on. And, you know, the more you join in with people TOM SAWYER ABROAD 159 in their joys and their sorrows, the more nearer and dearer they come to be to you. Now, we warn't cold and indifferent, the way most travellers is — we was right down friendly and sociable, and took a chance in everything that was going ; and the cara- van could depend on us to be on hand every time, it didn't make no difference what it was. When they camped, we camped right over them, ten or twelve hundred foot up in the air. When they et a meal, we et ourn, and it made it ever so much homeliker to have their .company. WTien they had a wedding, that night, and Buck and Addy got married, we got ourselves up in the very starchiest of the professor's duds for the blow-out ; and when they danced we j'ined in and shook a foot up there. But it is sorrow and trouble that brings you the nearest, and it was a funeral that done it with us. It was next morning, just in the still dawn. We didn't know the diseased, and he warn't in our set, but that never made no difference— he belonged to the caravan, and that was enough ; and there warn't no more sincerer tears shed over him than the i6o TOM SAWYER ABROAD WHEN' THEY PANCEP WE j'lNEP IN AMP SHOOK A FOOT CP THERE TOM SAWYER ABROAD 161 ones we dripped on him from up there eleven hun- dred feet on high. Yes, parting with this caravan was much more bitterer than it was to part with them others, which was comparative strangers, and been dead so long, anyway. We had knowed these in their lives, and was fond of them, too, and now to have death snatch them from right before our faces whilst we was looking, and leave us so lonesome and friend- less in the middle of that big Desert, it did hurt so, and we wished we mightn't ever make any more friends on that voyage if we was going to lose them again like that. We couldn't keep from talking about them, and they was all the time coming up in our memory, and looking just the way they looked when we was all alive and happy together. We could see the line marching, and the shiny spearheads a- winking in the sun, we could see the dromedaries lumbering along, we could see the wedding and the funeral, and more oftener than anything else we could see them praying, because they don't allow nothing to prevent that : whenever the call came, several times M 1 62 TOM SAWYER ABROAD a day, they would stop right there, and stand up and face the east and lift back their heads, and spread out their arms and begin, and four or five times they would go down on their knees, and then fall forwards and touch their forehead to the ground. Well, it warn't good to go on talking about them, lovely as they was in their life, and dear to us in their life and death both, because it didn't do no good, and made us too down-hearted. Jim allowed he was going to live as good a life as he could, so he could see them again in a better world ; and Tom kept still and didn't tell him they was only Mohammedans — it warn't no use to disappoint him, he was feeling bad enough just as it was. When we woke up next morning we was feeling a little cheerfuller, and had had a most powerful good sleep, because sand is the comfortablest bed there is, and I don't see why people that can afford it don't have ' it more. And it's terrible good ballast, too ; I never see the balloon so steady before. Tom allowed we had twenty tons of it, and TOM SAWYER ABROAD 163 1 64 TOM SAWYER ABROAD wondered what we better do with it ; it was good sand, and it didn't seem good sense to throw it away. Jim says : 1 Mars Tom, can't we tote it back home en sell it ? How long'll it take ? ' ' Depends on the way we go.' ' Well, sah, she's wuth a quarter of a dollar a load at home, en I reckon we's got as much as twenty loads, hain't we ? How much would dat be?' 1 Five dollars.' ' By jings, Mars Tom, le's shove for home right on de spot ! Hit's more'n a dollar en a half apiece, hain't it ? ' 'Yes.' ' Well, ef dat ain't makin' money de easiest ever / struck ! She jes' rained in — never cos' us a lick o' work. Le's mosey right along, Mars Tom.' But Tom was thinking and ciphering away so busy and excited he never heard him. Pretty soon he says : ' Five dollars — sho ! Look here, this sand's worth— worth — why, it's worth no end of money.' TOM SAWYER ABROAD 165 1 How is dat, Mars Tom ? Go on, honey, go on!' • Well, the minute people knows it's genuwyne sand from the genuwyne Desert of Sahara, they'll just be in a perfect state of mind to git hold of some of it to keep on the whatnot in a vial with a label on it for a curiosity. All we got to do is to put it up in vials and float around all over the United States and peddle them out at ten cents apiece. We've got all of ten thousand dollars' worth of sand in this boat.' Me and Jim went all to pieces with joy, and begun to shout whoopjamboreehoo ; and Tom says : * And we can keep on coming back and fetching sand, and coming back and fetching more sand, and just keep it a-going till we've carted this whole Desert over there and sold it out ; and there ain't ever going to be any opposition, either, because we'll take out a patent.' 1 My goodness ! ' I says. ' We'll be as rich as Creosote, won't we, Tom ? ' ' Yes — Creesus, you mean. Why, that dervish was hunting in that little hill for the treasures of 1 66 TOM SAWYER ABROAD the earth, and didn't know he was walking over the real ones for a thousand miles. He was blinder than he made the driver.' 'Mars Tom, how much is we gwyne to be worth ? ' ' Well, I don't know yet. It's got to be ciphered, and it ain't the easiest job to do, either, because it's over four million square miles of sand at ten cents a vial.' Jim was awful excited, but this faded it out considerable, and he shook his head and says : 'Mars Tom, we can't 'ford all dem vials — a king couldn't. We better not try to take de whole Desert, Mars Tom — de vials gwyne to bust us, sho.' Tom's excitement died out too, now, and I reckoned it was on account of the vials, but it wasn't. He set there thinking, and got bluer and bluer, and at last he says : ' Boys, it won't work ; we got to give it up.' * Why, Tom ? ' ' On account of the duties.' I couldn't make nothing out of that, neither could Jim. I says : TOM SAWYER ABROAD 167 ' What is our duty, Tom ? Because if we can't git around it, why can't we just do it? People often has to.' But he says : 1 Oh, it ain't that kind of duty. The kind I mean is a tax. Whenever you strike a frontier — that's the border of a country, you know — you find a Custom house there, and the Gov'ment officers comes and rummages amongst your things and charges a big tax, which they call a duty, because it's their duty to bust' you if they can ; and if you don't pay the duty they'll hog your sand. They call it confiscating, but that don't deceive nobody — it's just hogging, and that's all it is. Now, if we try to carry this sand home the way we're pointed now, we got to climb fences till we git tired — just frontier after frontier — Egypt, Arabia, Hindostan, and so on — and they'll all whack on a duty, and so you see, easy enough, we can't go that road.' 'Why, Tom,' I says, 'we can sail right over their old frontiers ; how are they going to stop us ? ' He looked sorrowful at me, and says, very grave : 1 68 TOM SAWYER ABROAD * Huck Finn, do you think that would be honest ? ' I hate them kind of interruptions. I never said nothing, and he went on : ' Well, we're shut off the other way, too. If we go back the way we've come, there's the New York Custom house, and that is worse than all of them others put together, on account of the kind of cargo we've got.' 'Why?' 1 Well, they can't raise Sahara sand in America, of course, and when they can't raise a thing there, the duty is fourteen hundred thousand per cent, on it if you try to fetch it in from where they do raise it.' ' There ain't no sense in that, Tom Sawyer.' 1 Who said there was ? What do you talk to me like that for, Huck Finn ? You wait till I say a thing's got sense in it before you go to accusing me of saying it.' ' All right ; consider me crying about it, and sorry. Go on.' Jim says : TOM SAWYER ABROAD 169 1 Mars Tom, do dey jam dat duty on to every- thing we can't raise in America, en don't make no 'stinction twix' anything ? ' 1 Yes, that's what they do.' • Mars Tom, ain't de blessin' o' de Lord de mos' valuable thing dey is ? ' ' Yes, it is.' ' Don't de preacher stan' up in de pulpit en call it down on de people ? ' 1 Yes.' ' Whan do it come from ? ' 1 From heaven.' ' Yassir ! you's jes' right, 'deed you is, honey — it come from heaven, en dat's a foreign country. Now den ! do dey put a tax on dat blessin' ? ' 1 No, they don't.' 1 'Course dey don't ; en so it stan' to reason dat you's mistaken, Mars Tom. Dey wouldn't put de tax on po' truck like san', dat everybody ain't 'bleeged to have, en leave it off'n de bes' thing dey is, which nobody can't git along widout.' Tom Sawyer was stumped ; he see Jim had got him where he couldn't budge. He tried to wiggle \JO TOM SAWYER ABROAD out by saying they had forgot to put on that tax, but they'd be sure to remember about it next Session of Congress, and they'd put it on ; but that was a poor lame come-off, and he knowed it. He said there warn't nothing foreign that warn't taxed but just that one, and so they couldn't be consistent without taxing it ; and to be consistent was the first law of politics. So he stuck to it that they'd left it out unintentional and would be certain to do their best to fix it before they got caught and laughed at. But I didn't feel no more interest in such things, as long as we couldn't git our sand through, and it made me low-spirited, and Jim the same. Tom he tried to cheer us up by saying he would think up another speculation for us that would be just as good as this one and better, but it didn't do no good — we didn't believe there was any as big as this. It was mighty hard ; such a little while ago we was so rich, and could 'a' bought a country and started a kingdom and been celebrated and happy, and now we was so poor and ornery again, and had our sand left on our hands. The sand was looking so lovely before, just like gold and dimonds, and the TOM SAWYER ABROAD 171 feel of it was so soft, and so silky and nice ; but now I couldn't bear the sight of it — it made me sick to look at it, and I knowed I wouldn't ever feel comfortable again till we got shut of it, and I didn't have it there no more to remind us of what we had been and what we had got degraded down to. The others was feeling the same way about it that I was. I knowed it, because they cheered up so the minute I says, ' Le's throw this truck over- board.' Well, it was going to be work you know, and pretty solid work, too ; so Tom he divided it up according to fairness and strength. He said me and him would clear out a fifth apiece of the sand, and Jim three-fifths. Jim he didn't quite like that arrangement. He says : 1 'Course I's de stronges', en I's willin' to do a share accordin' ; but by jings you's kinder pilin' it on to ole Jim, Mars Tom, hain't you r ' 1 Well, I didn't think so, Jim, but you try your hand at fixing it, and let's see.' So Jim he reckoned it wouldn't be no more than fair if me and Tom done a tenth apiece. 172 TOM SAWYER ABROAD Tom he turned his back to git room and be private, and then he smole a smile that spread around and covered the whole Sahara to the westward, back to the Atlantic edge of it where we come from. Then he turned around again and said it was a good enough arrangement, and we was satisfied if Jim was. Jim said he was. So then Tom measured off our two tenths in the bow and left the rest for Jim, and it surprised Jim a good deal to see how much difference there was and what a raging lot of sand his share come to, and said he was powerful glad, now, that he had spoke up in time and got the first arrangement altered ; for he said that even the way it was now there was more sand than enjoyment in his end of the contract, he believed. Then we laid into it. It was mighty hot work, and tough ; so hot we had to move up into cooler weather or we couldn't 'a' stood it. Me and Tom took turn about, and one worked while t'other rested ; but there warn't nobody to spell poor old Jim, and he made all that part of Africa damp, he sweated so. We couldn't work good, we was so TOM SAWYER ABROAD 173 full of laugh, and Jim he kept fretting and wanting to know what tickled us so, and we had to keep making up things to account for it, and they was pretty poor inventions, but they done well enough — Jim didn't see through them. At last when we got done we was 'most dead ; but not with work, but with laughing. By and by Jim was 'most dead too, but it was with work ; then we took turns and spelled him, and he was as thankful as he could be, and would set on the gunnel and swab the sweat, and heave and pant, arid say how good we was to a poor old nigger, and he wouldn't ever for git us. He was always the gratefulest nigger I ever see for any little thing you done for him. He was only nigger outside ; inside he was as white as you be. 174 TOM SAWYER ABROAD CHAPTER XII The next few meals was pretty sandy, but that don't make no difference when you are hungry ; and when you ain't it ain't no satisfaction to eat, anyway, and so a little grit in the meat ain't no particular drawback, as far as I can see. Then we struck the east end of the Desert at last, sailing on a north-east course. Away off on the edge of the sand, in a soft pinky light, we see three little sharp roofs like tents, and Tom says : ' It's the Pyramids of Egypt.' It made my heart fairly jump. You see, I had seen a many and a many a picture of them, and heard tell about them a hundred times, and yet to come on them all of a sudden, that way, and find they was real, 'stead of imaginations, 'most knocked the breath out of me with surprise. It's a curious thing that the more you hear about a grand and TOM SAWYER ABROAD 175 big and bully thing or person, the more it kind of dreamies out, as you may say, and gets to be a big dim wavery figger made out of moonshine and nothing solid to it. It's just so with George Wash- ington, and the same with them Pyramids. And moreover, besides, the things they always said about them seemed to me to be stretchers. There was a feller come to the Sunday school once, and had a picture of them, and made a speech, and said the biggest Pyramid covered thirteen acres, and was 'most five hundred foot high, just a steep mountain, all built out of hunks of stone as big as a bureau, and laid up in perfectly regular layers, like stair-steps. Thirteen acres, you see, for just one building; it's a farm. If it hadn't been in Sunday school, I would 'a' judged it was a lie ; and outside I was certain of it. And he said there was a hole in the Pyramid, and you could go in there with candles, and go ever so far up a long, slanting tunnel, and come to a large room in the stomach of that stone mountain, and there you would find a big stone chest with a king in it four thousand years old. I said to myself then, if that ain't a lie 176 TOM SAWYER ABROAD I will eat that king if they will fetch him, for even Methusalem warn't that old, and nobody claims it. As we come a little nearer we see the yaller sand come to an end in a long straight edge like a blanket, and on to it was joined, edge to edge, a wide country of bright green, with a snaky stripe crooking through it, and Tom said it was the Nile. It made my heart jump again, for the Nile was another thing that wasn't real to me. Now, I can tell you one thing which is dead certain : if you will fool along over three thousand miles of yaller sand, all glimmering with heat so that it makes your eyes water to look at it, and you've been a considerable part of a week doing it, the green country will look so like home and heaven to you that it will make your eyes water again. It was just so with me, and the same with Jim. And when Jim got so he could believe it teas the land of Egypt he was looking at, he wouldn't enter it standing up, but got down on his knees and took off his hat, because he said it wasn't fitten for a humble poor nigger to come any other way where such men had been as Moses and Joseph and TOM SAWYER ABROAD 177 Pharaoh and the other prophets. He was a Presby- terian, and had a most deep respect for Moses, which was a Presbyterian too, he said. He was all stirred up and says : ' Hit's de Ian' of Egypt, de Ian' of Egypt, en I's 'lowed to look at it wid my own eyes. En dah's de river dat was turn' to blood, en I's lookin' at de very same groun' whah de plagues was, en de lice, en de frogs, en de locus', en de hail, en whah dey marked de door-pos', en de angel 0' de Lord come by in de darkness 0' de night en slew de fust-born in all de Ian' of Egypt. Ole Jim ain't worthy to see dis day.' And then he just broke down and cried, he was so thankful. So between him and Tom there was talk enough, Jim being excited because the land was so full of history — Joseph and his brethren, Moses in the bulrushers, Jacob coming down into Egypt to buy corn, the silver cup in the sack, and all them interesting things ; and Tom just as excited too, because the land was so full of history that was in his line, about Noureddin, and Bedreddin, and such like monstrous giants, that made Jim's wool rise, N 1 7 8 TOM SAWYER ABROAD and a raft of other ' Arabian Nights ' folks, which the half of them never done the things they let on they done, I don't believe. Then we struck a disappointment, for one of them early-morning fogs started up, and it warn't no use to sail over the top of it, because we would go by Egypt, sure, so we judged it was best to set her by compass straight for the place where the Pyramids was gitting blurred and blotted out, and then drop low and skin along pretty close to the ground and keep a sharp look-out. Tom took the helium, I stood by to let go the anchor, and Jim he straddled the bow to dig through the fog with his eyes and watch out for danger ahead. We went along a steady gait, but not very fast, and the fog got solider and solider, so solid that Jim looked dim and ragged and smoky through it. It was awful still, and we talked low and was anxious. Now and then Jim would say : 'Highst her a p'int, Mars Tom, highst her!' and up she would skip a foot or two, and we would slide right over a flat- roofed mud cabin, with people that had been asleep on it just beginning to turn TOM SAWYER ABROAD 179 out and gap stretch ; and once when a feller was clear up on his hind legs so he could gap and stretch better, we took him a blip in the back and knocked him off. By and by, after about an hour, and everything dead still, and we a-straining our ears for sounds and holding our breath, the fog thinned a little very sudden, and Jim sung out in an awful scare : 1 Oh, for de lan's sake, set her back, Mars Tom, here's de biggest giant outen de ''Rabian Nights' a comin' for us ! ' and he went over backwards in the boat. Tom slammed on the back-action, and as we slowed to a standstill, a man's face as big as our house at home looked in over the gunnel, same as a house looks out of its windows, and I laid down and died. I must 'a' been clear dead and gone for as much as a minute or more ; then I come to, and Tom had hitched a boat-hook on to the lower lip of the giant and was holding the balloon steady with it whilst he canted his head back and got a good long look up at that awful face. Jim was on his knees with his hands clasped, 180 TOM SAWYER ABROAD gazing up at the thing in a begging way, and working his lips but not getting anything out. I took only just a glimpse, and was fading out again, but Tom says : ' He ain't alive, you fools ; it's the Sphynx ! ' I never see Tom look so little and like a fly ; but that was because the giant's head was so big and awful. Awful ! yes, so it was, but not dreadful any more, because you could see it was a noble face, and kind of sad, and not thinking about you, but about other things and larger. It was stone — red- dish stone — and its nose and ears battered, and that give it an abused look, and you felt sorrier for it for that. We stood off a piece, and sailed around it and over it, and it was just grand. It was a man's head, or maybe a woman's, on a tiger's body a hundred and twenty-five foot long, and there was a dear little temple between its front paws. All but the head used to be under the sand for hun- dreds of years, maybe thousands ; but they had just lately dug the sand away and found that little temple. It took a power of sand to bury that cretur ; TOM SAWYER ABROAD 181 'most as much as it would to bury a steamboat, I reckon. We landed Jim on top of the head, with an American flag to protect him, it being a foreign land ; then we sailed off to this and that and t'other distance, to get what Tom called effects and per- spectives and proportions, and Jim he done the best he could, striking all the different kinds of atti- tudes and positions he could study up, but standing on his head and working his legs the way a frog does was the best. The further we got away, the littler Jim got, and the grander the Sphynx got, till at last it was only a clothes-pin on a dome, as you might say. That's the way perspective brings out the correct proportions, Tom said ; he said Jul' us Caesar's niggers didn't know how big he was, they was too close to him. Then we sailed off further and further, till we couldn't see Jim at all any more, and then that great figger was at its noblest, a- gazing out over the Nile valley so still and solemn and lonesome, and all the little shabby huts and things that was scattered about it clean disappeared and gone, and 1 82 TOM SAWYER ABROAD nothing around it now but a soft wide spread of yaller velvet, which was the sand. That was the right place to stop, and we done it. We set there a-looking and a-thinking for a half an hour, nobody a-saying anything, for it made us feel quiet and kind of solemn to remember it had been looking over that valley just that same way, and thinking its awful thoughts all to itself for thousands of years, and nobody can't find out what they are to this day. At last I took up the glass and see some little black things a-capering around on that velvet carpet, and some more a- climbing up the cretur's back, and then I see two or three wee puffs of white smoke, and told Tcm to look. He done it, and says : 'They're bugs. No — hold on; they — why, 1 believe they're men. Yes, it's men — men and horses, both. They're hauling a long ladder up on to the Sphynx's back — now, ain't that odd ? And now they're trying to lean it up a There's some more puffs of smoke — it's guns! Huck, they're after Jim ! ' We clapped on the power, and went for them JIM HAD BEEN' STANDING A SIEGE A LONG TIME .84 TOM SAWYER ABROAD a-b'iling. We was there in no time, and come a- whizzing down amongst them, and they broke and scattered every which way, and some that was climbing the ladder after Jim let go all holts and fell. We soared up and found him laying on top of the head panting and most tuckered out, partly from howling for help and partly from scare. He had been standing a siege a long time — a week, he said, but it warn't so, it only just seemed so to him because they was crowding him so. They had shot at him, and rained the bullets all around him, but he warn't hit ; and when they found he wouldn't stand up and the bullets couldn't git at him when he was laying down, they went for the ladder, and then he knowed it was all up with him if we didn't come pretty quick. Tom was very indignant, and asked him why he didn't show the flag and command them to git, in the name of the United States. Jim said he done it, but they never paid no attention. Tom said he would have this thing looked into at Washington, and says : 1 You'll see that they'll have to apologise for insulting the flag, and pay an indemnity, too, on top of it, even if they git off that easy.' TOM SAWYER ABROAD 1 86 TOM SAWYER ABROAD Jim says : ' What's an indemnity, Mars Tom ? ' ' It's cash - that's what it is.' * Who gits it, Mars Tom ? ' ' Why ice do.' ' En who gits de apology ? ' ' The United States. Or we can take which- ever we please. We can take the apology, if we want to, and let the Gov'ment take the money.' 1 How much money will it be, Mars Tom ? ' ' Well, in an aggravated case like this one it will be at least three dollars apiece, and I don't know but more.' 1 Well, den, we'll take de money, Mars Tom — blame de 'pology ! Hain't dat yo' notion too ? En hain't it yourn, Huck ? ' W T e talked it over a little and allowed that that was as good a way as any, so we agreed to take the money. It was a new business to me, and I asked Tom if countries always apologised when they had done wrong, and he says : 1 Yes ; the little ones does.' We was sailing around examining the Pyramids, TOM SAWYER ABROAD 187 you know, and now ^e soared up and roosted on the flat top of the biggest one, and found it was just like what the man said in the Sunday school. It was like four pairs of stairs that starts broad at the bottom and slants up and comes together in a point at the top, only these stair-steps couldn't be dumb the way you climb other stairs ; no, for each step was as high as your chin, and you have to be boosted up from behind. The two other Pyramids warn't far away, and the people moving about on the sand between looked like bugs crawling, we was so high above them. Tom he couldn't hold himself, he was so worked up with gladness and astonishment to be in such a celebrated place, and he just dripped history from every pore, seemed to me. He said he couldn't scarcely believe he was standing on the very iden- tical spot the prince fltw from on the bionze horse. It was in the ' Arabian Night ' times, he said. Some- body give the prince a bronze horse with a peg in its shoulder, and he cOuld git on him and fly through the air like a bird, and go all over the world, and steer it by turning the peg, and fly high or low and land wherever he wanted to. 1 88 TOM SAWYER ABROAD When he got done telling it there was one of them uncomfortable silences that comes, you know, when a person has been telling a whopper and you feel sorry for him and wish you could think of some way to change the subject and let him down easy, but git stuck and don't see no way, and before you can pull your mind together and do something, that silence has got in and spread itself and done the business. I was embarrassed, Jim he was embar- rassed, and neither of us couldn't say a word. Well, Tom he glowered at me a minute, and says : ' Come, out with it. What do you think ? ' I says : 1 Tom Sawyer, you don't believe that yourself.' 1 What's the reason I don't ? What's to hender me?' ' There's one thing to hender you : it couldn't happen, that's all.' 1 What's the reason it couldn't happen ? ' ' You tell me the reason it could happen.' * This balloon is a good enough reason it could happen, I should reckon.' 1 Why is it ? ' TOM SAWYER ABROAD 189 ' Why is it ? I never saw such an idiot. Ain't this balloon and the bronze horse the same thing under different names ? ' ' No, they're not. One is a balloon and the other's a horse. It's very different. Next you'll be saying a house and a cow is the same thing.' ' By Jackson, Huck's got him ag'in ! Dey ain't no wigglin' outer dat ! ' ' Shut your head, Jim ; you don't know what you're talking about. And Huck don't. Look here, Huck, I'll make it plain to you, so you can under- stand. You see, it ain't the mere form that's got anything to do with their being similar or unsimilar, it's the principle involved ; and the principle is the same in both. Don't you see now ? ' I turned it over in my mind, and says : ' Tom, it ain't no use. Principles is all very well, but they don't git around that one big fact, that the thing that a balloon can do ain't no sort of proof of what a horse can do.' 1 Shucks, Huck ! you don't get the idea at all. Now, look here a minute — it's perfectly plain. Don't we fly through the air ? ' 1 9 o TOM SAWYER ABROAD < Yes.' • Very well. Don't we fly high or fly low, just as we please ? ' < Yes.' 1 Don't we steer whichever way we want to ? ' < Yes.' ' And don't we land when and where we please '? ' < Yes.' * How do we move the balloon and steer it ? ' ' By touching the buttons.' 1 Now I reckon the thing is clear to you at last. In the other case the moving and steering was done by turning a peg. We touch a button, the prince turned a peg. There ain't an atom of dif- ference, you see. I knowed I could git it through your head if I stuck to it long enough.' He felt so happy he begun to whistle. But me and Jim was silent, so he broke off surprised, and says: ' Looky here, Huck Finn, don't you see it yet ? ' I says : ' Tom Sawyer, I want to ask you some questions.' TOM SAWYER ABROAD 191 ' Go ahead,' he says, and I see Jim chirk up to listen. * As I understand it, the whole thing is in the buttons and the peg— the rest ain't of no conse- quence. A button is one shape, a peg is another shape, but that ain't any matter.' ' No, that ain't any matter as long as they've both got the same power.' 1 All right, then. What is the power that's in a candle and in a match ? ' ' It's the fire.' ' It's the same in both, then ? ' 1 Yes, just the same in both.' 1 All right. Suppose I set fire to a carpenter shop with a match, what will happen to that car- penter shop ? ' ' She'll burn up.' ' And suppose I set fire to this Pyramid with a candle — will she burn up ? ' 1 Of course she won't.' • All right. Now, the fire's the same, both times. Why does the shop burn, and the Pyramid don't ? ' • Because the Pyramid can't burn.' IQ2 TOM SAWYER ABROAD ' Aha ! and a horse can't fly ! ' ' My Ian', ef Huck ain't got him ag'in ! Huck's landed him high en dry dis time, /tell you ! Hit's de smartes' trap I ever see a body walk inter — en efl ' But Jim was so full of laugh he got to strangling and couldn't go on, and Tom was that mad to see how neat I had floored him, and turned his own argument ag'in him and knocked him all to rags and flinders with it, that all he could manage to say was that whenever he heard me and Jim try to argue it made him ashamed of the human race. I never said nothing — I was feeling pretty well satis- fied. When I have got the best of a person that way, it ain't my way to go around crowing about it the way some people does, for I consider that if I was in his place I wouldn't wish him to crow over me. It's better to be generous, that's what I think. TOM SAWYER ABROAD i 93 CHAPTEE XIII By and by we left Jim to float around up there in the neighbourhood of the Pyramids, and we dumb down to the hole where you go into the tunnel, and went in with some Arabs and candles, and away in there in the middle of the Pyramids we found a room and a big stone box in it where they used to keep that king, just as the man in the Sunday school said ; but he was gone now— somebody had got him. But I didn't take no interest in the place, because there could be ghosts there, of course ; not fresh ones, but I don't like no kind. So then we come out and got some little donkeys and rode a piece, and then went in a boat another piece, and then more donkeys, and got to Cairo; and all the way the road was as smooth and beau- tiful a road as ever I see, and had tall date pams on both sides, and naked children everywhere, and 194 TOM SAWYER ABROAD the men was as red as copper, and fine and strong and handsome. And the city was a curiosity. Such narrow streets — why, they were just lanes, and crowded with people with turbans, and women with veils, and everybody rigged out in blazing bright clothes and all sorts of colours, and you won- dered how the camels and the people got by each other in such narrow little cracks, but they done it — a perfect jam, you see, and everybody noisy. The stores warn't big enough to turn around in, but you didn't have to go in ; the store-keeper sat tailor fashion on his counter, smoking his snaky long pipe, and had his things where he could reach them to sell, and he was just as good as in the street, for the camel-loads brushed him as they wont by- Now and then a grand person flew by in a carriage with fancy dressed men running and yelling in front of it and whacking anybody with a long rod that didn't get out of the way. And by and by along comes the Sultan riding horseback at the head of a procession, and fairly took your breath- away his clothes was so splendid ; and everybody TOM SAWYER ABROAD 195 fell flat and laid on his stomach while he went by. I forgot, but a feller helped me remember. He was one that had a rod and run in front. There was churches, but they don't know enough to keep Sunday — they keep Friday and break the Sabbath. You have to take off your shoes when you go in. There was crowds of men and boys in the church, setting in groups on the stone floor and making no end of noise — getting their lessons by heart, Tom said, out of the Koran, which they think is a Bible, and people that knows better knows enough to not let on. I never see such a big church in my life before, and most awful high it was ; it made you dizzy to look up. Our village church at home ain't a circumstance to it ; if you was to put it in there, people would think it was a dry- goods box. What I wanted to see was a dervish, because I was interested in dervishes on account of the one that played the trick on the camel driver. So we found a lot in a kind of a church, and they called themselves Whirling Dervishes ; and they did whirl, too — I never see anything like it. They had tall o2 i 9 6 TOM SAWYER ABROAD sugar-loaf hats on, and linen petticoats ; and they spun and spun and spun, round and round like tops, and the petticoats stood out on a slant, and it was the prettiest thing I ever see, and made me drunk to look at it. They was all Moslems. Tom said, and when I asked him what a Moslem was, he said it was a person that wasn't a Presbyterian. So there is plenty of them in Missouri, though I didn't know it before. We didn't see half there was to see in Cairo, because Tom was in such a sweat to hunt out places that was celebrated in history. We had a most tiresome time to find the granary where Joseph stored up the grain before the famine, and when we found it it warn't worth much to look at, being such an old tumble-down wreck ; but Tom was satisfied, and made more fuss over it than I would make if I stuck a nail in my foot. How he ever found that place was too many for me. We passed as much as forty just like it before we came to it, and any of them would 'a' done for me, but none but just the right one would suit him. I never see anybody so particular as Tom Sawyer. The minute he struck TOM SAWYER ABROAD 197 the right one he reconnised it as easy as I would reconnise my other shirt if I had one, but how he done it he couldn't any more tell than he could fly ; he said so himself, Then we hunted a long time for the house where the boy lived that learned the Cadi how to try the case of the old olives and the new ones, and said it was out of the ' Arabian Nights,' and he would tell me and Jim about it when he got time. Well, we hunted and hunted till I was ready to drop, and I wanted Tom to give it up and come next day and git somebody that knowed the town and could talk Missourian and could go straight to the place ; but no — he wanted to find it himself, and nothing else would answer. So on we went. Then at last the remarkablest thing happened I ever see. The house was gone — gone hundreds of years ago — every last rag of it gone but just one mud brick. Now, a person wouldn't ever believe that a backwoods Missouri boy that hadn't ever been in that town before could go and hunt that place over and find that brick, but Tom Sawyer done it. I know he done it, because I see him do it. I was right by his very side at the 198 TOM SAWYER ABROAD time, and see him see the brick and see him recon- nise it. Well, I says to myself, how does he do it ? Is it knowledge, or is it instink ? Now, there's the facts, just as they happened ; let everybody explain it their own way. I've ciphered over it a good deal, and it's my opinion that some of it is knowledge but the main bulk of it is instink. The reason is this. Tom put the brick in his pocket to give to a museum with his name on it and the facts when he went home, and I slipped it out and put another brick considerable like it in its place, and he didn't know the difference — but there was a difference, you see. I think that settles it— it's mostly instink, not knowledge. Instink tells him where the exact place is for the brick to be in, and so he reconnises it by the place it's in, not by the look of the brick. If it was knowledge, not instink, he would know the brick again by the look of it the next time he seen it — which he didn't. So it shows that for all the brag you hear about knowledge being such a wonderful thing, instink is worth forty of it for real unerringness. Jim says the same. TOM SAWYER ABROAD 199 When we got back Jim dropped down and took us in, and there was a young man there with a red skull cap and tassel on, and a beautiful blue silk jacket and baggy trousers with a shawl around his waist and pistols in it, that could talk English and wanted to hire to us as guide and take us to Mecca and Medina and Central Africa and everywheres for a half a dollar a day and his keep, and we hired him and left, and piled on the power, and by the time we was through dinner we was over the place where the Israelites crossed the Red Sea when Pharaoh tried to overtake them and , was caught by the waters. We stopped then, and had a good look at the place, and it done Jim good to see it. He said he could see it all now, just the way it happened ; he could see the Israelites walk- ing along between the walls of water, and the Egyptians coming from away off yonder, hurrying all they could, and see them start in as the Israelites went out, and then, when they was all in, see the walls tumble together and drown the last man of them. Then we piled on the power again, and rushed away and huvvered over Mount Sinai, and 200 TOM SAWYER ABROAD saw the place where Moses broke the tables of stone, and where the children of Israel camped in the plain and worshipped the golden calf ; and it was all just as interesting as could be, and the guide knowed every place as well as I know the village at home. But we had an accident, now, and it fetched all the plans to a standstill. Tom's old onery corn-cob had got so old and swelled and warped that she couldn't hold together any longer, notwithstanding the strings and bandages, but caved in and went to pieces. Tom he didn't know what to do. The professor's pipe wouldn't answer — it warn't any- thing but a mershum, and a person that's got used to a cob pipe knows it lays a long ways over all the other pipes in this world, and you can't git him to smoke any other. He wouldn't take mine, I couldn't persuade him. So there he was. He thought it over, and said we must scour around and see if we could roust out one in Egypt or Arabia or around in some of these countries ; but the guide said no, it warn't no use — they didn't have them. So Tom was pretty glum for a little while, TOM SAWYER ABROAD 201 then he chirked up and said he'd got the idea and knowed what to do. He says : ' I've got another corn-cob pipe, and it's a prime one too, and nearly new. It's laying on the rafter that's right over the kitchen stove at home in the village. Jim, you and the guide will go and git it, and me and Huck will camp here on Mount Sinai till you come back.' ' But, Mars Tom, we couldn't ever find de village. I could find de pipe, 'caze I knows de kitchen, but my Ian' ! we can't ever find de village, nur Sent Louis, nur none 0' dem places. We don't know de way, Mars Tom.' That was a fact, and it stumped Tom for a minute. Then he said : ' Looky here, it can be done, sure ; and I'll tell you how. You set your compass and sail west as straight as a dart, till you find the United States. It ain't any trouble, because it's the first land you'll strike the other side of the Atlantic. If it's day- time when you strike it, bulge right on, straight west from the upper part of the Florida coast, and in an hour and three-quarters you'll hit the mcuth 202 TOM SAWYER ABROAD of the Mississippi — at the speed that I'm going to send you. You'll be so high up in the air that the earth will be curved considerable — sorter like a washbowl turned upside down — and you'll see a raft of rivers crawling around every which way, long before you get there, and you can pick out the Mississippi without any trouble. Then you can follow the river north nearly an hour and three- quarters, till you see the Ohio come in ; then you want to look sharp, because you're getting near. Away up to your left you'll see another thread coming in — that's the Missouri, and is a little above St. Louis. You'll come down low then, so as you can examine the villages as you spin along. You'll pass about twenty -five in the next fifteen minutes, and you'll recognise ours when you see it — and if you don't you can yell down and ask.' ' Ef it's dat easy, Mars Tom, I reckon we kin do it ; yassir, I knows we kin.' The guide was sure of it too, and thought that he could learn to stand his watch in a little while. ' Jim can learn you the whole thing in a half TOM SAWYER ABROAD 203 an hour,' Tom said. ' This balloon's as easy to manage as a canoe.' Tom got out the chart and marked out the course and measured it, and says : ' To go back west is the shortest way, you see. It's only about 7,000 miles. If you went east, and so on around, it's over twice as far.' Then he says to the guide : ' I want you both to watch the tell-tale all through the watches, and whenever it don't mark 300 miles an hour, you go higher or drop lower till you find a storm- current that's going your way. There's 100 miles an hour in this old thing without any wind to help. There's 200-mile gales to be found, any time you want to hunt for them.' ■ We'll hunt for them, sir.' 1 See that you do. Sometimes you may have to go up a couple of miles, and it'll be p'ison cold, but most of the time you'll find your storm a good deal lower. If you can only strike a cyclone — that's the ticket for you ! You'll see by the professor's books that they travel west in these latitudes ; and they travel low, too.' 204 TO M SAWYER ABROAD X TOM SAWYER ABROAD 205 Then he ciphered on the time, and says : ' Seven thousand miles, 300 miles an hour — you can make the trip in a day — twenty-four hours. This is Thursday ; you'll be back here Saturday after- noon. Come, now, hustle out some blankets and food and books and things for me and Huck, and you can start right along. There ain't no occasion to fool around — I want a smoke, and the quicker you fetch that pipe the better.' All hands jumped for the things, and in eight minutes our things was out and the balloon was ready for America. So we shook hands good-bye, and Tom give his last orders : ' It's ten minutes to two p.m., now, Mount Sinai time. In twenty-four hours you'll be home, and it'll be six to-morrow morning, village time. When you strike the village, land a little back of the top of the hill, in the woods, out of sight ; then you rush down, Jim, and shove these letters in the post office, and if you see anybody stirring, pull your slouch down over your face so they won't know you. Then you go and slip in the back way, to the kitchen and git the pipe, and lay this piece of 206 TOM SAWYER ABROAD paper on the kitchen table and put something on it to hold it, and then slide out and git away and don't let aunt Polly catch a sight of you, nor nobody else. Then you jump for the balloon and shove for Mount Sinai 300 miles an hour. You won't have lost more than an hour. You'll start back seven or eight a.m., village time, and be here in twenty-four hours, arriving at two or three p.m., Mount Sinai time.' Tom he read the piece of paper to us. He wrote on it : ' Thursday Afternoon. — Tom Sawyer the Krronort sends his love to aunt Polly from Mount Sinai, where the Ark was, and so does I Inch- Finn, and she trill get it to-morrow morning half-pant rix. 1 'Tom Sawyer the Erronort.' ' That'll make her eyes bulge out and the tears come,' he says. Then he says : ■ Stand by ! One — two — three — away you go ! ' And away she did go ! why, she seemed to whiz out of sight in a second. 1 This misplacing of the Ark is probably Huck's error, not Tom's.— M. T, TOM SAWYER ABROAD 207 I 2o8 TOM SAWYER ABROAD The first thing Tom done was to go and hunt up the place where the tables of stone was broke, and as soon as he found it he marked the place, so as we could build a monument there. Then we found a most comfortable cave that looked out over that whole big plain, and there we camped to wait for the pipe. The balloon come back all right and brung the pipe ; but aunt Polly had catched Jim when he was getting it, and anybody can guess what happened : she sent for Tom. So Jim he e ' Mars Tom, she's out on de porch wid her vyv sot on de sky a layin' for you, en she say she ain't gwyne to budge from dah tell she gits hold of you. Dey's gwyne to be trouble, Mars Tom — 'deed dey is.' So then we shoved for home, and not feeling very gay, neither. riiiNiii) bi Sro-ITLNWOOIIK AMP •'., Nl.W Mill. I. I gQI Si;!: LONDON & Hist oC 35ooft<$ $ufiltstie& ig CHATTO & WINDUS 214, Piccadilly, London, W. A BOUT.— THE FELLAH : An Egyptian Novel. By Edmond About. ** Translated by Sir Randal Roberts. Post 8vo, illustrated boards, 8 s. U)AMS (W. DAVENPORT), WORKS BY. A DICTIONARY OP THE DRAMA. Being a comprehensive Guide to the Plays Playwrights, Players, and Playhouses of the United Kingdom and America Crown 8vo half-bound, 18s. 6d. [Preparing. QUIPS AND QUIDDITIES. Sele c ted b v W. P. Adams. Po st Svo, cloth limp, 8s. « FR OM W H OSE BOURNE, &c. With 47 Illustra tions. BARRETT (FRANK, Author of "Lady Biddy Fane,") NOVELS BY. Post 8vo, illustrated boards, 2*. each; cloth, 2«. Od. each. FETTERED FOR LIFE. 1 A PRODIGAL'S PROGRESS. THE SIN OF OLGA ZASSOULICH. ; JOHN FORD; and HIS HELPMATE. BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH. I A RECOILING VENGEANCE. FOLLY MORRISON. I HONEST DAVIE. \ LIEUT.BARNABAS. | FOUND GUIL1 LITTLE LADY LINTON. I FOR LO VE AND HONOUR. THE WOMAN OF THE IRON bRACKLKTS. Three Vols, crown 8vo. BEACONSFI ELD, LORD. B y T. 1>. O'Connor, M.P. Cr. 8vo, cloth, BEAUCHAMP— GRANTLEY GRANGE: A Novel. By Shelsl Beaochamp. Post 8vo, illustrated boards, 2s. BMUTTFULTTCTUR'ES BY ^RTtTSITARTISTS : A Gathering frc the Picture Galleries, engraved on Steel. Imperial 4t o, cloth extra, gilt edees, 2 BECHSTETN.— AS PRETTY AS SEVENT^d ether German Stori Collected by Lunwio Bechstein. With Additional Tales by the Brothers Gim and 98 Illustrations by Richter. Sq u are 8vo, clo th extra, Os. O d.; gilt edge s, 7«. ( BEERBOHM.-WANDERINGS IN PATAGONIA ; or, Life amSi£~ Ostrich Hunt er s. By J ulius Bkerbohm. With Illust s. Cr. 8vo, cl. extra, 3 s. 6 BENNETT (W. C, LL.D), WORKS BY. l**t8ro, cloth limp. 2-7^ A BALLAD HISTORY OF ENGLAND. | SONGS FOR SAILORS BESANT (WALTER), NOVELS BY. Cr. 8vo, cl. ex., 3s. Od. each ; post Kvo. illust. bds., 2s. each ■ cl. limp 2s. Od. ea ALL SORTS AND CONDITIONS OF MEN. With Illustrations by Frkd Barnak THE CAPTAINS' ROOM, &c. With Frontispiece by E. I. Whfklkr ALL IN A GARDEN FAIR. With 6 Illustrations by Harry Furniss ' DOROTHY FORSTER. With Frontispiece by Chart ks Green UNCLE JACK, and other Stories. | CHILDREN OFGIBEON SMSKSlf^!!! £ ER T W r ELL . THEH - XPi* '''^t "atious by ^Forest, HERR PAULUS: His Rise, Ins Greatness, and his Fall. -n R rf?} T SA N Si F J R 7 EE , D0M x\r. Wi, , l l, Illustr . ations b ? A.Forestier and F. Wad THE C BE L LL OF ST^AuW™ 9 IlluStrafl ° nS ^ A ' Forest.er. THE HOLY ROSE.&c. With Frontispiece by F. Barnard ARMOREL OF LYONESSE: A Romance of To-day. With'12 Illusts bvF FUrni ST. K ATHERINE'S BY THE TOWER. With 12 page Illus.ra tons' bv C C rkA VERBENA CAMELLIA STEPHANOTIS, &c. | THE IVOR YOAT^ • A Nove F 'HE T Emor R Y 3 &^&&£&£I&J»4^ Crown 8v °. <=><>* extra, . THl lRT^I^TIO C N HA De D n^ FE l R . IES - Wth ****• ^. 8vo, cl. extra', LONDON. With 124 Illustrations. Demy 8vo, cloth extra 1S« GASPARE Ruaift"^ F ™^4 cVown^v^Irish Linen. 3. < m «1^ « COLIGNY. W ith a Portra it. Crown 8vo, Irish linen, 3s. Od. THE REBEL QUEEN: A Kovel. Three VolsTcrow n 8vo _ WA C?o E w R nl E o 8A I^i"„e S „7« y . B ^ 0HN Under »^' With Photograph Portra - - . IP nOI CHATTO & WINDUS, 214, P ICCADILLY. BESANT (WALTER) AND JAMES RICE, NOVELS BY. Cr.8vo.cl. ex., 3a. 6d. each ; post 8vo, illust. bds„ 2s. each; cl. limp. 2s. (id. each READY-MONEY MORTIBOY. BY CELIA'S ARBOUR. MY LITTLE GIRL. WITH HARP AND CROWN. THIS SON OF YULCAN. THE GOLDEN BUTTERFLY. THE MONKS OF THELEMA. THE CHAPLAIN OF THE FLEET. THE SEAMY SIDE. THE CASE OF MR. LUCRAFT, &c 'TWAS IN TRAFALGAR'S BAY\ &c. THE TEN YEARS' TENANT, &c. %* There is also a LIBRARY EDITION of the above Twelve Volumes, handsomely set in new type, on a large crown 8vo page, and bound in cloth extra, ft*, e ach. BEWICK (THOMAS) AND HIS PUPILS. By Austin Dobson. With 95 Illustrations. Square 8vo. cloth extra, 6s. BIERCE.— IN THE MIDST OF LIFE : Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, By Ambrose Bierce. Crown 8vo, cloth extra, 6s.; post 8vo, illustr ated boards, 2s. BLACKBURN'S (HENRY) ART HANDBOOKS. ACADEMY NOTES, separate years, from 1875-1887, 1889-1892, each la. ACADEMY NOTES, 1893. With Illustrations. Is. ACADEMY NOTES, 1875-79. Complete in One Vol., with 6oo Illusts. Cloth limp, 6a. ACADEMY NOTES, 1880-84. Complete in One Vol. with 700 Illusts Cloth limp, 6s. GROSVENOR NOTES, 1877. 6d. GROSYENOR NOTES, separate vears, from 1878 to 1890, each Is. GROSVENOR NOTES, Vol. I., 1877-82. With 300 Illusts. Demy 8vo, cloth limp, 6s. GROSYENOR NOTES, Vol. II., 1883-87. With 300 Illusts. Demy 8vo, cloth limp, 6s. GROSYENOR NOTES, Vol. III., 1888-90. With 230 Illusts. Demy 8vo, cloth, 3s 6d. THE NEW GALLERY, 1888-1892. With numerous Illustrations, each Is. THE NEW GALLERY, 1893. With Illustrations. Is. THE NEW GALLERY, Vol. I., 1888-1892. With 250 Illusts. Demy 8vo, cloth, 6s. ENGLISH PICTURES AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY. 114 Illustrations. Is. OLD MASTERS AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY. 128 Illustrations. Is. 6d. ILLUSTRATED CATALOG UE TO THE NATIONAL GALLERY. 242 Illusts. cl., 3a. THE PARIS SALON, 1893. With Facsimile Sketches. 3s. T HE PARIS SOCIETY OF FINE ARTS, 1893. With Sketches. 3s. 6d. IBLAKE (WILLIAM) : India-proof Etchings from his Works by William Bell Scott. With descriptive Text. Folio, half-bound boards, 21s. BLIND (MATHILDE). Poems by. Crown 8vo, cloth extra, 5s. each. THE ASCENT OF MAN. DRAMAS IN MINIATURE. With a Frontispiece by Ford Madox Brown. SON GS A ND SONNETS. Fcap. 8vo, vellum and gold. BOURNE (H. R. FOX), WORKS BY. ENGLISH MERCHANTS : Memoirs in Illustration of the Progress of British Com- merce. With numerous Illustrations. Crown 8vo, cloth extra, 7s. 6d. ENGL1 SH NEWSPAPERS: The Historv of Tournalism. Two Vols., demy 8vo, cl., 25s. THE OTHER S ID E OF T HE EMIN PAS HA RE LIEF EX PEDI TION. Cr. 8vo. 6s . BWERS.— LEAVES FROM A HUNTING JOURNAL. By George Bowers. Oblong folio, half-bound, 21s. BOYLE (FREDERICK), WORKS BY. Post 8vo, illustrated boards, 2s. each. CHRONICLES^ OF NO-MAN' S LAND. 1 CAMP NOTES. | SAYAGE L IFE. BRAND'S OBSERVATIONS ON POPULAR ANTIQUITIES ; chiefly illustrating the Origin of our Vulgar Customs, Ceremonies, and Superstitions. With the Additions of Sir Henry Ellis, an d Il l ustrations. Or. 8vo. cloth extra, 7s. 6d. BREWER (REV. DR.), WORKS BY. THE READER'S HANDBOOK OF ALLUSIONS, REFERENCES, PLOTS, AND STORIES. Fifteenth Thousand. Crown Xvo, cloth extra, 7s. 6d. AUTHORS AND THEIR WORKS, WITH THE DATES: Being the Appendices to "The Reader's Handbook," separately printed. Crown 8vo, cloth limp. 2a. A DICTIONARY OF MIRACLES. Crown 8vo, cloth extra, 7s. 6d. BREWSTER (SIR DAVID), WORKS BY. Post 8vo, cl. ex., 4a. Od. each. MORE WORLDS THAN ONE: Creed of Philosopher and Hope of Christian. Plates. ". THE MARTYRS OF SCIENCE: Galileo.TvchoBrahe. and Kepler. With Portraits. LETTERS ON NAT URAL MAGIC^ With jiumjjrousjliustrations. BRILLAT-SAVARIN.— GASTRONOMY AS A FINE ART. By Brillat- h Savarin. Translated by R. E. Anderson, M.A. Post 8vo, half-bound, 2s. BOOKS PUBLISHED BY BRET HARTE, WORKS BY. LIBRARY EDITION. In Seven Volumes, crown 8vo, cloth extra. <$s. each. BRET HARTE'S COLLECTED WORKS. Arranged and Revised by the Author. Vol. I. Complete Poetical and Dramatic Works. With Steel Portrait. Vol. II. Luck of Roaring Camp— Bohemian Papers — American Legends. Vol. III. Tales of the Argonauts— Eastern Sketches. Vol. IV. Gabriel Conroy. | Vol. V. Stories— Condensed Novels, &c. Vol. VI. Tales ok the Pacific Slope. Vol. VII. Tales of the Pacific Slope— II. With Portrait by John Pettie, R.A. | THE SELECT WORKS OF BRET HARTE, in Prose and Poetry With Introductory j Essay by J. M. Bellew, Portrait of Author, and solllusts. Cr.8vo, rl. ex.. ?n. (»ti. I BRET HARTE'S POETICAL WORKS. Hand-made paper &buckram. Cr.8vo. 4*.<>ri. : THE QUEEN OF THE PIRATE ISLE. With 28 original Drawings by Kate | Greena way, reproduce d in Colours bv Edmun d Evans. Small 410, cloth, 5s. Crown 8vo, cloth extra, 3s. Ud. each. A WAIF OF THE PLAINS. With 60 Illustrations by Stanley L. Wood. A WARD OF THE GOLDEN GATE. With 59 Illustrations by Stanley L Wood. I A SAPPHO OF GREEN SPRINGS, &c. With Two Illustrations bv Hume Nisbkt. COLONEL STARBOTTLE'S CLIENT, AND SOME OTHER PEOPLE. With a Frontispiece by Fred. Barnard. BUSY: A Novel. With Frontispiece and Vignette by J. A. Christie. SALLY DOWS, &c. With 47 Illusttations by W. D. Almond. &c. A PROTEGEE OF JACK HAMLIN'S. With 2s Il lustrations by A. S. Boyd, &c. Post 8vo, illustrated boards, iis. each. GABRIEL CONROY. I THE LUCK OF ROARING CAMP, &c. AN HEIRESS OF RED DOG, &c. | CALIFORNIAN 3T0RIES. Post 8vo, illustrated boards, £s. each; cloth limp, 'i*. 6d. each. FLIP. I MARUJA. I A PHYLLIS OF THE SIERRAS. Fcap. Svo picture cover. Is. each. THE TWINS OF TABLE MOUNTAIN. I JEFF BRIGGS'S LOVE STORY. 8N0W BOUND AT EAGLES. I „______ B~RYDGES.- UNCLE SAM At HOME.' By Harold Brydges. Post Svo. illustrated boards. '2*. : cloth limp, Mr*. d. HOLMES (OLIVER WENDELL), WORKS BY. THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. Illustrated by J. GonnoH Thomson. Post 8vo, cloth limp It*, (id. — Another Edition, post Svo, cloth, t$*. THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE r.nd THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. In One Vol. l'ost Svo. balf-bonnd, !#>. HOOD'S (THOMAS) CHOICE WORKS, in Prose and Verse. With Life of the Author, Portrait, and 200 Illustrations. Crown Svo, cloth extra, 7*. <>«l. HOOD'S WHIMS AND ODDITIES. Withjs Illusts. Post Svo, halt-bound, VS«. HOOD (TOM). -FROM NOWHERE TO THE NORTH POLE : A Noah's Arkaeological Narrative. By Tom Hood. With 25 Illustrations by W. Brunton and K. ('. Barnes. Square Svo, cloth extra, gilt edges, <»*. HOOK'S (THEODORE) CHOICE HUMOROUS WORKS; including bii Ludicrous Adventures, Bons Mots, Puns, and Hoaxes. With Life of the Author, Portraits, Facsimiles, and Illustrations. Crown 8vo, cloth extra, 7*. <»«l. HOOPER.— THE HOUSE OF RABY : A Novel. By Mrs. George Hooper. Post 8vo, illustrated boards, *2». HOPKINS.-"; 'T WIXT LOVE" AND "DUTY :» f A Novel. By Tighe Hopkins. Post Svo. illustrated boards, tm. HORNEV— ORION: An Epic Poem. By RichardHengjst JI : k With Photographic Portrait by Summers. Ten t h E dition. Cr Svo, rlot'n extra, ?». HUNGERFORD (MRS.), Author of "Molly Pawn," NOVELS BY. Post 8vo, illustrated boards, '£». each ; cloth limp, 'is. Ad. each. A MAIDEN ALL FORLORN. I IN DURANCE VILE. | A MENTAL STRUGGLE. MARYEL. I A MODERN CIRCE. LADY YERNERS FLIGHT. Crown 8vo, cloth extra, 3». Gd. THE RE D HOUSE MYSTERY. Two Vols., crown 8vo. HUNT.-ESSAYS BY LEIGH HUNT : A Talk for a Chimney Corner, &c. Edited by Edmund Olli er. Post 8vo, printed on laid paper and hslf-L.I.. i*. HUNT (MRS. ALFRED), NOVELS BY. Crown 8vo, cloth extra, »». «d. each; post 8vo, illustrated boards. * «. JDLER(THE): A Monthly Magazine. Edited by Jerome K. Jerome and Robert E. Barr. Profusely Illustrated. Sixpence Monthly. The fir.- 1 Four Volumes are now ready, cloth extra, Hn. each 5 Cases tor Binding, 1*. Gd. CHATTO &. VVlNDUS, 214, PICCADILLY. INGELOW (JEAN). -FATED TO BE FREE. Post 8vo, illustrated Ms., a.. INDOOR PAU PERS. By One of Thf.m. Crown 8vo, Is.; cloth , Is. 6d. INNKEEPER'S HANDBOOK (THE) AND LICENSED VICTUALLERS M ANUAL. By J. Trevor-Davids. Cro wn 8vo, Is.; cloth. Is. Oil. IRISH WIT AND HUMOUR, SONGS OF. Collected and Edited by A. Perceval Graves . Post 8vo. clot h limp. 2s. 6d. JAMES. -A ROMANCE OF THE QUEEN'S HOUNDS. By Chaules James. Post 8vo, pi cture cover, Is. ; cloth limp, Is. 6d. JAMESON.— MY DEAD SELF. By William Jameson. Post 8vo7 illustrated boards, 3a. ; cloth, '.is. 6d. JANVIER. -PRACTICAL KERAMICS FOR STUDENTS. By Catherine A. Janvier. Crown 8vo. cloth extra, 6s. JAPP. -DRAMATIC PICTURirS,~SWNETS7&e. By A. H. Japp, LL.DT Cro wn 8vo, cloth extra, 5s. JAY (HARRIETT), NOVELS BY. Post 8vo, illustrated boards, 2s. each. T HE DARK COL LE EN. | THE Q U KEN OF CONNAUGHT. JEFFERIES (RICHARD), WORKS BY. Post 8vo, cloth iim P> 2*. 6d7elch. NATURE NEAR LONDON. | THE LIFE OF THE FIELDS. | THE OPEN AIR. %• Also the Hand-made Pap er Edition, crown 8vo, buckram, gilt top, 6s. each. THE EULOGY OF RICHARD JEFFERIES. By Walter Besant. Second Edi- tion With a Photograph Portrait. Crown Svo, cloth extra, 6s. JENNINGS (H. J.), V/ORKS BY. CURIOSITIES OF CRITICISM. Post Svo, cloth limp, 2s. 6d. LORD TENNYSON: A Biographical Sketch. With a Photograph. Cr. 8vo, cl., 6s. JEROME.— STAGELAND. By Jerome K. Jerome. With 64 lliustra- tions by J. Bernard Partri dge. Square 8vo, pictur e cover, Is. ; cloth limp, 3s. JERROLD.— THE BARBElR'S^HATRT&THE HEDGEHOG LETTERS." By Douglas Jerrold. Post 8vo, printed on laid pap? r and halt-bo und. 3s. JERROLD (TOM), WORKS BY. Post 8vo, Is. each; cloth limp, Is. 6d. each. THE GARDEN THAT PAID THE RENT. HOUSEHOLD HORTICULTUR E; A Gossip about F lowers. Illustrated. OUR KITCHEN GARDEN: The Plants, and How we Cook Them. Cr. 8vo.cl.,ls.6d. JESSE.- SCENES AND OCCUPATIONS OF A COUNTRY LIFE. By Edward Jesse. Post Svo, cloth limp, 2s. JONES (WILLIAM, F.S.A.), WORKS BY. Cr.Svo, cl. extra, 7*. 6d. each. FINGER-RING LORE: Historical, Legendary, and Anecdotal. With nearly 300 Illustrations. Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged. CREDULITIES, PAST AND PRESENT. Including the Sea and Seamen, Miners, Talismans, Word and Letter Divination, Exorcising and Blessing of Animals, Birds, Egss, Luck, &c. With an Etched Frontispiece. CROW NS AND CORONAT IONS: A History of Regalia. With 100 Illustrations. JONSON'S (BEN) WORKS. With Notes Critical and Explanatory, and a Biographical Memoir by William Gifford. Edited by Colonel Cunning- ham Three Vols., crown Svo, cloth extra, 6s. each. ____ JOSEPHUS, THE COMPLETE WORKS OF. Translated by Whiston. Containing "The Antiquities of the Jews" and "The Wars 01 the Jews." With 53 Illustrations and Maps. Two Vols., demy 8vo, half-bound, 12s. 6d. ITEMPT.— PENCIL AND PALETTE : Chapters on Art and Artists. By Robert Kempt. Post 8vo, cloth limp, 2s. 6d. KERSHAW. - COLONIAL FACTS AND FICTIONS : Humorous Sketches. By Mark Kershaw. Post 8vo. illustrated boards, 2s. ; cloth, 2s. 6d. KEYSER. — CUT BY THE MESS : A Novel. By Arthur Kkysek. Crown 8vo, picture cover, Is. ; cloth limp, Is. 6d. ___ KING(R7ASH1), NOVELS BY. Cr. Svo, cl.,Ss.6d.ea.; post Svo, bds., 2s. ea. A DRAWN GAME. | " THE WEARING OF THE GREEN." Post Svo, illustrated boards, 2s. each. PA'Sm'S SLAYE. 1 i BELL BARRY. BOOKS PUBLISHED BY KNIGHT. — THE PATIENT'S VADE MECUM : How to Get Most Benefit from Medical Advice. By William Knight, M.R.C.S., and Edward Knight, L. R.C.P ._Crown 8vo, 1*^} cloth limp, !■. Od. . KNIGHTS (THE) OF THE LION : A Romance of the Thirteenth Century. Edited, with an Introd uction , b y the Marquess of Lorne. K.T. Cr Svo. r I. ex. Oa. IAMB'S (CHARLESF~COMPLETE WORKS, in Prose and Verse, *^ including " Poetry for Children " and " Prince Dorus." Edited, with Notes and Introduction, by K. H. Shepherd. With Two Portraits and Facsimile of a page of the " Essay on Roast Pig.*' Crown 8vo, half-bound, 7a. 6d. THE ESSAYS OP ELIA. Post 8vo, printed on laid paper and half-bound, 2s. LITTLE ESSAYS: Sketches and Characters by Charles Lamb, selected from his Letters by Percy Fitzgerald. Post 8vo, cloth limp, 'i*. 6