ABSTRACT
For some time past Mr. Clemens has been carried away by the ambition of seriousness and fine writing. In Huckleberry Fitzn he returns to his right mind, and is again the Mark Twain of old time. It is such a book as he, and he only, could have written. It is meant for boys; but there arc few men (we should hope) who, once they take it up, will not delight in it. It forms a companion or sequel, to Tom Sawyer: Huckleberry Finn, as everybody knows, is one ofT om's closest friends; and the present volume is a record of the adventures which befell him soon after the event which made him a person of property and brought Tom Sawyer's story to a becoming conclusion. They are of the most surprising and delightful kind imaginable, and in the course of them we fall in with a number of types of character of singular freshness and novelty, besides being schooled in half a dozen extraordinary dialects -the Pike County dialect in all its forms, the dialect of the Missouri negro, and 'the cxtrcmest form of the backwoods South-Western dialect,' to wit. Huckleberry, it may be noted, is stolen by his disreputable father, to escape from whom he contrives an appearance of robbery and murder in the paternal hut, goes off in a canoe, watches from afar the townsfolk hunting for his dead body, and encounters a runaway negro-Miss Watson's Jim-an old particular friend ofT om Sawyer and himself. With Jim he goes south down the river, :md is the
