s and
astonishment to be in such a celebrated place, and he just dripped
history from every pore, seemed to me. He said he couldn't scarcely
believe he was standing on the very identical spot the prince flew
from on the Bronze Horse. It was in the Arabian Night times, he said.
Somebody give the prince a bronze horse with a peg in its shoulder, and
he could git on him and fly through the air like a bird, and go all over
the world, and steer it by turning the peg, and fly high or low and land
wherever he wanted to.

When he got done telling it there was one of them uncomfortable silences
that comes, you know, when a person has been telling a whopper and you
feel sorry for him and wish you could think of some way to change the
subject and let him down easy, but git stuck and don't see no way, and
before you can pull your mind together and DO something, that silence
has got in and spread itself and done the business. I was embarrassed,
Jim he was embarrassed, and neither of us couldn't say a word. Well, Tom
he glowered at me a minute, and says:

"Come, out with it. What do you think?"

I says:

"Tom Sawyer, YOU don't believe that, yourself."

"What's the reason I don't? What's to hender me?"

"There's one thing to hender you: it couldn't happen, that's all."

"What's the reason it couldn't happen?"

"You tell me the reason it COULD happen."

"This balloon is a good enough reason it could happen, I should reckon."

"WHY is it?"

"WHY is it? I never saw such an idiot. Ain't this balloon and the bronze
horse the same thing under different names?"

"No, they're not. One is a balloon and the other's a horse. It's very
different. Next you'll be saying a house and a cow is the same thing."

"By Jackson, Huck's got him ag'in! Dey ain't no wigglin' outer dat!"

"Shut your head, Jim; you don't know what you're talking about. And
Huck don't. Look here, Huck, I'll make it plain to you, so you can
understand. You see, it ain't the mere FORM that's got anything to do
with their being similar or unsimilar, it's the PRINCIPLE involved; and
the principle is the same in both. Don't you see, now?"

I turned it over in my mind, and says:

"Tom, it ain't no use. Principles is all very well, but they don't git
around that one big fact, that the thing that a balloon can do ain't no
sort of proof of what a horse can do."

"Shucks, Huck, you don't get the idea at all. Now look here a
minute--it's perfectly plain. Don't we fly t