d then the teacher charged in,
and made us drop everything and cut. I didn't see no di'monds, and I
told Tom Sawyer so. He said there was loads of them there, anyway; and
he said there was A-rabs there, too, and elephants and things. I said,
why couldn't we see them, then? He said if I warn't so ignorant, but
had read a book called Don Quixote, I would know without asking. He
said it was all done by enchantment. He said there was hundreds of
soldiers there, and elephants and treasure, and so on, but we had
enemies which he called magicians, and they had turned the whole thing
into an infant Sunday-school, just out of spite. I said, all right;
then the thing for us to do was to go for the magicians. Tom Sawyer
said I was a numskull.

"Why," said he, "a magician could call up a lot of genies, and they
would hash you up like nothing before you could say Jack Robinson.
They are as tall as a tree and as big around as a church."

"Well," I says, "s'pose we got some genies to help _us_--can't we lick
the other crowd then?"

"How you going to get them?"

"I don't know. How do _they_ get them?"

"Why, they rub an old tin lamp or an iron ring, and then the genies
come tearing in, with the thunder and lightning a-ripping around and
the smoke a-rolling, and everything they're told to do they up and do
it. They don't think nothing of pulling a shot-tower up by the roots,
and belting a Sunday-school superintendent over the head with it--or
any other man."

"Who makes them tear around so?"

"Why, whoever rubs the lamp or the ring. They belong to whoever rubs
the lamp or the ring, and they've got to do whatever he says. If he
tells them to build a palace forty miles long out of di'monds, and
fill it full of chewing-gum, or whatever you want, and fetch an
emperor's daughter from China for you to marry, they've got to do
it--and they've got to do it before sun-up next morning, too. And
more: they've got to waltz that palace around over the country
wherever you want it, you understand."

"Well," says I, "I think they are a pack of flatheads for not keeping
the palace themselves 'stead of fooling them away like that. And
what's more--if I was one of them I would see a man in Jericho before
I would drop my business and come to him for the rubbing of an old tin
lamp."

"How you talk, Huck Finn. Why, you'd _have_ to come when he rubbed it,
whether you wanted to or not."

"What! and I as high as a tree and as big as a church? All