d imbrued its little hands in gore,
and gallantly retrieved the lost battle, and triumphantly protected
innocence and beauty."

Mark Twain also indicated the singular isolation of Henry James by
expressing precisely the same opinion in his immortal chronicle of the
adventures of Tom Sawyer. "There comes a time in every rightly
constructed boy's life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and
dig for buried treasure." And what an entrancing career Tom had
planned for himself in an earlier chapter! "At the zenith of his fame,
how he would suddenly appear at the old village and stalk into church,
brown and weather-beaten, in his black velvet doublet and trunks, his
great jack-boots, his crimson sash, his belt bristling with
horse-pistols, his crime-rusted cutlass at his side, his slouch hat
with waving plumes, his black flag unfurled, with the skull and
cross-bones on it, and hear with swelling ecstasy the whisperings,
'It's Tom Sawyer the Pirate!--The Black Avenger of the Spanish Main.'"

When Tom and Huck Finn went treasure seeking they observed the
time-honored rules of the game, as the following dialogue will recall
to mind:

"Where'll we dig?" said Huck.

"Oh, most anywhere."

"Why, is it hid all around?"

"No, indeed it ain't. It's hid in mighty particular places, Huck,
sometimes on islands, sometimes in rotten chests under the limb of an
old dead tree, just where the shadow falls at midnight; but mostly
under the floor in ha'nted houses."

"Who hides it?"

"Why, robbers, of course. Who'd you reckon, Sunday-school
superintendents?"

"I don't know. If 'twas mine I wouldn't hide it; I'd spend it and have
a good time."

"So would I. But robbers don't do that way. They always hide it and
leave it there."

"Don't they come after it any more!"

"No, they think they will, but they generally forget the marks or else
they die. Anyway, it lays there a long time and gets rusty; and by and
by somebody finds an old yellow paper that tells how to find the
marks,--a paper that's got to be ciphered over about a week because
it's mostly signs and hy'roglyphics."

Hunting lost treasure is not work but a fascinating kind of play that
belongs to the world of make believe. It appeals to that strain of
boyishness which survives in the average man even though his pow be
frosted, his reputation starched and conservative. It is, after all,
an inherited taste handed down from the golden age of fairies. The