by
their owners with a care that can only be called loving, and their
spiritual welfare was the frequent concern in particular of the mistress
of the house.

In his schoolboy days, Mark Twain had no aversion to slavery. He wasn't
even aware that there was anything wrong about it. He never heard it
condemned by acquaintances or in the local papers. And as for the
preachers, they taught that God approved slavery, and cited Biblical
passages in support of that view. If the slaves themselves were averse
to it, at least they kept discreetly silent on the subject. He seldom
saw a slave misused--on the farm, never. But when he was brought face
to face with Sandy, the little slave forcibly separated from his family,
it made a deep impression upon his consciousness. It was this
deplorable evil of the system, this unnatural and inhuman forcible
separation of the members of the same family, the one from the other,
that convinced him of the injustice of slavery; though this vision, as
has been pointed out by Mr. Howells, did not come to him "till after his
liberation from neighbourhood in the vaster far West." Yet it found its
way into his books--into Huckleberry Finn, with its recital of Jim's
pathetic longing to buy back his wife and children; and in Pudd'nhead
Wilson with its moving picture of the poor slave's agony when she
suddenly realizes in the way the water is flowing around the snag that
she is being "sold down the river." In Uncle Tom's Cabin, as Professor
Phelps has pointed out, "the red--hot indignation of the author largely
nullified her evident desire to tell the truth. . . . Mrs. Stowe's
astonishing work is not really the history of slavery; it is the history
of abolition sentiment. . . . Mark Twain shows us the beautiful side
of slavery--for it had a wonderfully beautiful, patriarchal side--and he
also shows us the horror of it." Mark Twain has declared that the only
way to write a great novel is to learn the scenes and people with which
the story is concerned, through years of "unconscious absorption" of the
facts of the life to be portrayed. When his stories were written,
slavery was a thing of the past--he was competent to judge of the
situation impartially, through direct personal contact throughout his
boyhood with the realities of slavery. His object was not the object of
the reformer, warped with prejudice and fired by animosity. He saw
clearly; for his aim was not polemic, but artistic. H