Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians

by Twain, Mark

  “If I could have the cunning little rascal that sat down in the fire after he got cooled off—”

  There was a flash of scarlet and the little fiend was present and smiling; and he had with him some books from the school; among them the French-English dictionary and the phonographic shorthand system.

  “There. Use him night and day. He knows what he is here for. If he needs help he will provide it. He requires no lights; take them, and go to bed; leave him to study his books. In five minutes he will be able to talk broken English in case you want him. He will read twelve or fifteen of your books in an hour and learn shorthand besides; then he will be a capable secretary. He will be visible or invisible according to your orders. Give him a name—he has one already, and so have I, but you would not be able to pronounce either of them. Good-bye.”

  He vanished.

  Hotchkiss stood smiling all sorts of pleasant smiles of intricate and variegated pattern at his little devil, with the idea of making him understand how welcome he was; and he said to himself, “It’s a bitter climate for him, poor little rascal, the fire will go down and he will freeze; I wish I knew how to tell him to run home and warm himself whenever he wants to.”

  He brought blankets and made signs to him that these were for him to wrap up in; then he began to pile wood on the fire, but the red stranger took that work promptly off his hands, and did the work like an expert—which he was. Then he sat down on the fire and began to study his book, and his new master took the candle and went away to bed, meditating a name for him. “He is a dear little devil,” he said, “and must have a nice one.” So he named him Edward Nicholson Hotchkiss—after a brother that was dead.

  Chapter 6

  IN THE MORNING the world was still invisible, for the powdery snow was still sifting thickly down—noiselessly, now, for the wind had ceased to blow. The new devil appeared in the kitchen and scared aunt Rachel and uncle Jeff out of it, and they fled to the master’s room with the tale. Hotchkiss explained the situation and told them there was no harm in this devil, but a great deal of good; and that he was the property of the wonderful boy, who had strongly recommended him.

  “Is he a slave, Marse Oliver?” asked Rachel.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, den, dey oughtn’t to be much harm in him, I reckon; but is he a real devil?”

  “Yes, genuine.”

  “Den how kin he be good?”

  “Well, he is, anyway. We have been misinformed about devils. There’s a great deal of ignorant prejudice around, concerning them. I want you to be friends with this one.”

  “But how kin we, Marse Oliver?” asked uncle Jeff; “we’s afraid of him. We’d like to be friends wid him, becase we’s afraid of him, en if he stays on de place, ’course we gwyne to do de bes’ we kin; but when he come a skippin’ into de kitchen all red hot like a stack of fire-coals, bless you I didn’t want nothin’ to do wid him. Still, if he’s willin’ to be friends it ain’t gwyne to answer for us to hold back, for Gawd on’y knows what he might do.”

  “S’pose things don’t go to suit him, Marse Oliver,” said Rachel, “what he gwyne do den?”

  “Really, you needn’t worry, Rachel, he has a kind disposition, and moreover he wants to be useful—I know it.”

  “Why, Marse Oliver, he’ll take en tear up all de hymn-books en—”

  “No he won’t; he’s perfectly civil and obliging, and he’ll do anything he is asked to do.”

  “Is dat so?”

  “I know it.”

  “But what kin he do, Marse Oliver? he’s so little, en den he don’t know our ways.”

  “Oh, he can do anything—shovel snow, for instance.”

  “My! kin he do dat?” asked Jeff. “If he’ll do dat, I’s his friend, for one—right on de spot!”

  “Yes, and he can run errands—any errand you want, Rachel.”

  “Dat ’ud come mighty handy, Marse Oliver,” said Rachel, relenting; “he can’t run none now, ’course, but if de snow ’uz gone—”

  “He’ll run them for you, I know he will; I wish he were here, I—”

  Edward Nicholson Hotchkiss appeared in their midst, and the negroes scrambled for the door, but he was there first and barred the way. He smiled an eager and fiery smile, and said—

  “I’ve been listening. I want to be friends—don’t be afraid. Give me an errand—I’ll show you.”

  Rachel’s teeth chattered a little, and her breath came short and she was as pale as bronze; but she found her tongue, and said—

  “I’s yo’ friend—I is, I swah it. Be good to me en ole Jeff, honey—don’t hurt us; don’t do us no harm, for yo’ ma’s sake.”

  “Hurt you?—no. Give me an errand—I’ll show you.”

  “But chile, dey ain’t no errand; de snow’s so deep, en you’d catch cold, anyway, de way you’s been raised. But sakes, if you’d been here yistiddy evenin’—Marse Oliver I clean forgot de cream, en dey ain’t a drop for yo’ breakfast.”

  “I’ll fetch it,” said Edward, “go down—you’ll find it on the table.”

  He disappeared. The negroes were troubled, and did not know what to make of this. They were afraid of him again; he must be off his balance, for he could not run errands in this weather. Hotchkiss smoothed away their fears with persuasive speeches, and they presently went below, where they found the new servant trying to tame the cat and not succeeding; but the cream was there, and their respect for Edward and his abilities received a great impulse.

  * “Sister” in the Methodist, or Presbyterian, or Baptist, or Campbellite church—nothing more. A common form, in those days.

  Huck Finn

  WELL, I had a noble big bullfrog that I had traded a hymn-book for, and was all profit, becuz it never cost me anything, deacon Kyle give it to me for saving his daughter’s life time she fell in the river off of the ferry boat going down to the picnic in Cave Holler, and warn’t any use to me on account of my being able to get along without hymns, and I traded the bullfrog for a cat, and sold the cat for a false-face, a horrible thing that was awful to look at and cost fifteen cents when it was new, and so I was prospering right along and was very well satisfied.

  But I lent it to Tom Sawyer and he lent it to Miss Rowena Fuller, which was a beautiful young lady and a favorite and full of spirits and never quiet but always breaking out in a new place with her inventions and making the whole town laugh, for she just lived for fun and was born for it. She was lovely in her disposition and the happiest person you ever see, and people said it took the sorrow out of life to see that girl breeze around and carry on, and hear her laugh, and certainly she done a lot of it, she was that lively and gay and pranksome.

  She never meant any harm with her jokes, poor thing, but she never laughed any more after that time. She wouldn’t ever done what she done if she had thought what was going to come of it. But she didn’t think, she got right to work on her project, and she was so full of it she couldn’t think; and she was so full of laugh that she couldn’t hold still, but kept breaking out in a fresh place all the time, just with antissipations. She was going to scare old Miss Wormly, which was a superstitious old maid and lived all alone and was that timid she was afraid of everything, specially of ghosts, and was always dreading them, she couldn’t help it. Miss Rowena put on the false-face and got herself up in a shroud and started for Miss Wormly’s about eleven at night, with a lot of young people trailing after her to see the fun; and she tiptoed in, and Miss Wormly was sitting by her lamp sort of half dozing, and she crept up behind her and bent around and looked her in the face, still and solemn and awful. Miss Wormly turned white like a dead person, and stared and gasped for a second, then she begun to scream and shriek, and jumped up and started to run, but fainted and fell on the floor. She was gone mad, poor old harmless lady, and never got over it. Spent all her days in the sylum, and was always moaning and crying, and many a time jumping out of her bed in the night, thinking the ghost was after her again. Poor Miss Rowena’s life was spoilt
, too, she never got up any more jokes and couldn’t ever laugh at anything any more.

  REFERENCE

  MATERIAL

  Explanatory Notes

  These notes give dates and general circumstances of composition for each work reprinted here, and they discuss topical allusions, furnish historical background, and define words or phrases not readily found in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language. Whenever Mark Twain modeled a fictional character after someone he knew, a note names the person. Names printed in SMALL CAPITALS indicate the person is more fully identified in the Biographical Directory.

  Notes are keyed to page and line of the text: 4.10 means page 4, line 10 (chapter titles are not included when counting lines). Works are cited either by an abbreviation or by the author’s last name, followed by a page (or page and volume) number: (MTBus, 24) or (Conard, 4:192). If more than one work by an author is cited by last name, the year of publication is used to distinguish them: (Dodge 1877, 12) means page 12 of the volume Dodge published in 1877, rather than the one he published in 1883, cited elsewhere as (Dodge 1883). Complete bibliographical information for all works cited is provided in References.

  Previously unpublished words by Mark Twain are identified by a dagger (†) in the citation and are © 1989 by Edward J. Willi and Manufacturers Hanover Trust Company as Trustees of the Mark Twain Foundation, which reserves all reproduction or dramatization rights in every medium.

  Boy’s Manuscript

  (1868)

  “Boy’s Manuscript” is the earliest of Mark Twain’s fictional works to draw extensively upon his boyhood memories of Hannibal. It is, in Bernard DeVoto’s phrase, “the embryo of Tom Sawyer,” which Mark Twain began to write some four or five years later. In it the author demonstrates his evocative powers and his special gift for colloquial speech, as well as his intuitive preference for stories told “autobiographically,” like Huckleberry Finn.

  Mark Twain completed “Boy’s Manuscript,” but did not publish it. The first two pages of the manuscript (and thus the author’s own title) are lost and have been missing at least since Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain’s first posthumous literary editor, found the surviving fifty-eight pages among the Mark Twain Papers. Typed on the envelope in which Paine stored the manuscript is the following: “Boy’s Manuscript, beginning page 3 Probably written about 1870.” When DeVoto first published the story in 1942, he adopted Paine’s phrase as the title, and later editors accepted that decision. Paine’s guess about the date of composition—“about 1870”—was also accepted by DeVoto and others (DeVoto 1942, 5–6, 7; TS, 419), but the physical evidence of the manuscript—paper, ink, and handwriting style—suggests a much earlier date, probably sometime between October and late November 1868. The paper is a type that Mark Twain used with some frequency in letters written between September 1868 and early January 1869, and then only infrequently until June 1869, when he stopped using it entirely. The compact handwriting and black ink make the manuscript, in overall appearance, nearly identical to letters he wrote in October 1868.

  This physical evidence is reinforced by biographical fact. In the fall of 1868, Clemens was assiduously courting Olivia Langdon, of Elmira, New York. Early in September, she turned down his initial proposal of marriage, but by the end of November, after two more refusals, she had changed her mind. (The pair became formally engaged in February 1869 and were married a year later.) Clearly some of the vicissitudes of Clemens’s own courtship are reflected, obliquely and with gentle satire, in Billy Rogers’s wooing of “Darling Amy.”

  1.5 Amy] ANNA LAURA HAWKINS.

  2.7–9 Jimmy Riley . . . lick him again] The now missing pages of the manuscript presumably informed the reader that the keeper of this journal was Billy Rogers, and that he had just had a fight with Jimmy Riley. Riley may have been modeled on JIM REAGAN.

  2.24–27 they would have carried me into her house . . . I would have had to stay there till I got well] Billy’s fantasy is clearly based on an experience that Clemens had shortly before writing this sketch. On 28 September 1868, after a brief stay at Olivia Langdon’s Elmira home, Clemens, accompanied by her brother, Charles, was preparing to depart for the railroad depot: “Charley & I got into the wagon at 8 PM, to leave for New York, & just as we sat down on the aftermost seat the horse suddenly started, the seat broke loose, & we went over backwards, Charley falling in all sorts of ways & I lighting exactly on my head in the gutter & breaking my neck in eleven different places. I lay there about four or five minutes, completely insensible. . . . They took us in the library & laid us out” (SLC to Mary Mason Fairbanks, 5 Oct 68, CSmH, in MTMF, 39–40). Almost forty years later, in his autobiography, Clemens confessed that he had only feigned injury and unconsciousness in order to prolong his visit and further his courtship (AD, 14 Feb 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:106–9). Gladys Bellamy in 1950 was the first to notice this and other similarities between events in Clemens’s own courtship and events represented in the story (Bellamy, 333).

  3.16 twenty-two commas and a white alley] Small marbles made from common clay were called “commas,” or “commies.” Superior and often larger marbles used for shooting were called “alleys,” originally made from alabaster, but frequently of glass in imitation of alabaster (Cassidy, 1:39–40, 741).

  4.29 a sure-enough china] A marble made from genuine porcelain (Cassidy, 1:627).

  4.29 spool cannon] A toy cannon made by attaching elastic material to one end of a spool so that a pencil or similar projectile can be shot through the spool hole (TS, 473).

  4.34 potato-gun] A blowgun which uses pieces of potato as missiles. It is prepared by sharpening a large, hollow goose quill and pushing the sharpened end into a potato, a piece of which is then expelled by blowing on the other end of the quill (Howard and Howard, 24).

  5.21 blue mass pills] A preparation of mercury, used as a laxative (Wood and Bache, 929–31).

  6.2–3 the water treatment—douche, sitz, wet-sheet and shower-bath] In the 1840s and 1850s, the United States was swept by the “water cure” craze, a medical regimen using various ostensibly therapeutic applications of cold water. Here, Billy Rogers names several of the more popular treatments: the douche, in which patients stood or sat under a strong stream of water falling from a height of five to twenty feet; the sitz bath, which required sitting in a washtub roughly one-third full of water, with the feet outside the tub; the wet-sheet pack, in which patients were tightly wrapped in a sheet that had been dipped in cold water and wrung out, then bundled in blankets until warm, and finally immersed in a cold or tepid bath; and the shower bath, in which water was sprayed on the patient from overhead (Cayleff, 37–38; Weiss and Kemble, 18, 22;OED 1933, 9:769). In 1901, addressing a New York state legislative committee on public health, Clemens recalled that he was about nine years old when “the cold water cure was first talked about. . . . I remember how my mother used to stand me up naked in the back yard every morning and throw buckets of cold water on me, just to see what effect it would have. . . . And then, when the dousing was over, she would wrap me up in a sheet wet with ice water and then wrap blankets around that and put me to bed. . . . I would get up a perspiration that was something worth seeing” (Fatout, 386–87).

  8.18 turned down foot] Sent to the end of the line. In a spelling bee such as the one described in chapter 6 of Tom Sawyer, students lined up in accord with their standing at the end of the previous contest, the winner first. Each misspelling caused a player to move one place lower in the line, so that by missing enough words even the winner of the previous contest could end up at the opposite end, or foot, of the line (TS, 80, 480). The rules of the spelling bee described by Billy Rogers were evidently more draconian, since Billy is “turned down foot” for missing a single word.

  12.2–4 Capt. Kydd . . . Morgan . . . Gibbs . . . Lafitte . . . Black Avenger of the Spanish Main!] Billy invokes one fictional pirate and four real, if legendary, ones. William Kidd (1645?—1701) was commissioned in 1696 by King Willia
m III to suppress piracy, particularly off the coast of America, but later was charged with piracy himself. He admitted that acts of piracy had been committed, but claimed that he had been overpowered by a mutinous crew. Despite inconclusive evidence, he was found guilty and hanged. Sir Henry Morgan (1635?–88) was a British buccaneer who raided Spanish possessions in the West Indies and Central America. Charles Gibbs (1794–1831), from Rhode Island, plundered merchant vessels along the coast of Cuba and was known for slaughtering the crews of ships he took. Jean Laffite or Lafitte (1780?–?1826), a Frenchman, led a band of privateers and smugglers headquartered off the coast of Louisiana. During the War of 1812 Laffite and his men helped General Andrew Jackson defend New Orleans and, as a reward, were pardoned for past crimes (Gosse, 222–28, 133–34). The Black Avenger of the Spanish Main; or, The Fiend of Blood (1847) was a sensational adventure novel by Ned Buntline (Edward Z. C. Judson).

  12.35–13.3 Bill Bowen, he bought a louse from Archy Thompson . . . and begun to stir him up with a pin] A true incident that involved Clemens’s Hannibal schoolmates WILLIAM BOWEN and ARCHIBALD FUQUA. “I still remember the louse you bought of poor Arch Fuqua,” Clemens wrote Bowen on 25 January 1868. “I told about that at a Congressional dinner in Washington the other day, & Lord, how those thieves laughed! It was a gorgeous old reminiscence. I just expect I shall publish it yet, some day” (TxU, in MTLBowen, 17). He included the incident in chapter 7 of Tom Sawyer, where Tom and his “bosom friend” Joe Harper (who is based on Bowen) torment a tick.

  15.12 nigger-show business . . . he wanted to be bones] In minstrel shows “Bones” was the character who played bones or castanets. He and the tambourine (or banjo) player were known in minstrel parlance as “end men”; they sat at opposite ends of the stage, sang comic songs, and engaged in banter with the “middleman,” who sat between them and who was generally made the butt of their jokes. Clemens recalled that the “first negro-minstrel show” he ever saw came to Hannibal in the early 1840s, when he was ten years old or less. “It was a new institution . . . and it burst upon us as a glad and stunning surprise. . . . ‘Bones’ and ‘Banjo’ were the prime jokers and whatever funniness was to be gotten out of paint and exaggerated clothing they utilized to the limit” (AD, 30 Nov 1906, CU-MARK, in MTE, 110–11, 112).