than he made the
driver."

"Mars Tom, how much is we gwyne to be worth?"

"Well, I don't know yet. It's got to be ciphered, and it ain't the
easiest job to do, either, because it's over four million square miles
of sand at ten cents a vial."

Jim was awful excited, but this faded it out considerable, and he shook
his head and says:

"Mars Tom, we can't 'ford all dem vials--a king couldn't. We better not
try to take de whole Desert, Mars Tom, de vials gwyne to bust us, sho'."

Tom's excitement died out, too, now, and I reckoned it was on account
of the vials, but it wasn't. He set there thinking, and got bluer and
bluer, and at last he says:

"Boys, it won't work; we got to give it up."

"Why, Tom?"

"On account of the duties."

I couldn't make nothing out of that, neither could Jim. I says:

"What IS our duty, Tom? Because if we can't git around it, why can't we
just DO it? People often has to."

But he says:

"Oh, it ain't that kind of duty. The kind I mean is a tax. Whenever you
strike a frontier--that's the border of a country, you know--you find a
custom-house there, and the gov'ment officers comes and rummages among
your things and charges a big tax, which they call a duty because
it's their duty to bust you if they can, and if you don't pay the duty
they'll hog your sand. They call it confiscating, but that don't deceive
nobody, it's just hogging, and that's all it is. Now if we try to carry
this sand home the way we're pointed now, we got to climb fences till we
git tired--just frontier after frontier--Egypt, Arabia, Hindostan, and
so on, and they'll all whack on a duty, and so you see, easy enough, we
CAN'T go THAT road."

"Why, Tom," I says, "we can sail right over their old frontiers; how are
THEY going to stop us?"

He looked sorrowful at me, and says, very grave:

"Huck Finn, do you think that would be honest?"

I hate them kind of interruptions. I never said nothing, and he went on:

"Well, we're shut off the other way, too. If we go back the way we've
come, there's the New York custom-house, and that is worse than all of
them others put together, on account of the kind of cargo we've got."

"Why?"

"Well, they can't raise Sahara sand in America, of course, and when they
can't raise a thing there, the duty is fourteen hundred thousand per
cent. on it if you try to fetch it in from where they do raise it."

"There ain't no sense in that, Tom Sawyer."

"Who said there WAS? What do