an
unexplored and uninhabited island, far from the haunts of men, and
they said they never would return to civilization. The climbing
fire lit up their faces and threw its ruddy glare upon the pillared
tree-trunks of their forest-temple, and upon the varnished foliage
and the festooning vines.

There is a magic in it. Mark Twain, when he wrote it, felt renewed in
him all the old fascination of those days and nights with Tom
Blankenship, John Briggs, and the Bowen boys on Glasscock's Island.
Everywhere in Tom Sawyer there is a quality, entirely apart from the
humor and the narrative, which the younger reader is likely to overlook.
No one forgets the whitewashing scene, but not many of us, from our early
reading, recall this delicious bit of description which introduces it:

The locust-trees were in bloom, and the fragrance of the blossoms
filled the air. Cardiff Hill, beyond the village and above it, was
green with vegetation, and it lay just far enough away to seem a
delectable land, dreamy, reposeful, and inviting.

Tom's night visit home; the graveyard scene, with the murder of Dr.
Robinson; the adventures of Tom and Becky in the cave--these are all
marvelously invented. Literary thrill touches the ultimate in one
incident of the cave episode. Brander Matthews has written:

Nor is there any situation quite as thrilling as that awful moment
in the cave when the boy and girl are lost in the darkness, and when
Tom suddenly sees a human hand bearing a light, and then finds that
the hand is the hand of Indian Joe, his one mortal enemy. I have
always thought that the vision of the hand in the cave in Tom Sawyer
was one of the very finest things in the literature of adventure
since Robinson Crusoe first saw a single footprint in the sand of
the sea-shore.

Mark Twain's invention was not always a reliable quantity, but with that
eccentricity which goes with any attribute of genius, it was likely at
any moment to rise supreme. If to the critical, hardened reader the tale
seems a shade overdone here and there, a trifle extravagant in its
delineations, let him go back to his first long-ago reading of it and see
if he recalls anything but his pure delight in it then. As a boy's story
it has not been equaled.

Tom Sawyer has ranked in popularity with Roughing It.

Its sales go steadily on from year to year, and are likely to continue so
long as boys and g